What a gem is ‘L’emmerdeur‘ (distributed in the Anglophone market as ‘A Pain in the Ass‘), the 85-minute film made in 1973 by Édouard Molinaro. It is a ‘noir’ comedy that catches Lino Ventura at the peak of his popularity built mostly on ‘tough guy’ roles – either gangsters or policemen – and gives the popular singer Jacques Brel the opportunity of his last big screen role (the tenth in only six years of activity as an actor). Both actors discover and use their comic resources to the maximum, in a genre different than the ones audiences know them in, bringing to screen a script full of verve and action written by Francis Veber (based on his own theater play), who would try with much less success a ‘remake’, 35 years later, in his last film as a director.
The story, which takes place in Montpellier, combines marital melodrama with film noir with paid assassins as heroes. Milan is sent to eliminate a witness who is going to reveal the truth about a gangster network at a trial. He rents a room at a hotel overlooking the entrance of the courthouse where the future victim will get out of the car at 2:00 p.m. His bad luck is that in the adjoing room has just checked-in François Pignon, a traveling salesman who tries in vain to arrange a meeting with his wife who left him for her psychiatrist. The desperate Pignon’s suicide attempt may disrupt the assassin’s plans, attracting the attention of the police, who are already on alert. Milan must try to convince Pignon not to kill himself and at the same time fulfill his mission. It won’t be easy.
The impossible combination of Ventura – Brel works perfectly, to the delight of the spectators. It can be said that Ventura is playing a gangster role as he has played in many other films, but this time he is put in situations where he is very very unlucky. Brel borrows mime and comic gags from beloved comedy actors of the period. Veber‘s screenplay is written in such a way that the events happen almost in real time. It is one of the post-Nouvelle Vague influences, the other being the free use of the mobile camera, which takes us into hotel rooms, high up on railings and cornices outside the hotel, or in super-fast car chases, as the hero must be at the scene of the future crime at 2:00 p.m., as I said. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard had already worked with Truffaut, Godard and Costa-Gavras. The result of their collaboration is a film that uses in a professional manner the techniques of the cinematographic avant-garde to create a quality ‘crowd-pleaser’ that passes well the test of half a century that has elapsed since its release.