Rating: 9/10
Dir: Aki Kaurismäki
Star: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Margi Clarke, Charlesa Cork, Serge Reggiani
[8] Those expecting the follow-up to I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle will be disappointed, as this is no gore-fest. Instead, it’s a quite wonderful, dotty little black comedy about a French clerical worker in London who hires an assassin to help him commit suicide. Léaud is superbly dead-pan as the clerk and Kaurismäki has a good foreigner’s eye for London, which never looked so grimy. Hearing some of the stories about the film’s making (Ken Colley, who plays the assassin, claims tongue-in-cheek that the only directorial instruction he got was “Act better”), you wonder how it got made at all – alcohol apparently played a large part! Unlikely to get the release it deserves, Channel 4 helped fund it, so it’ll probably turn up there at some point. Definitely worth watching.