Eating Raoul (1982)

(On Cable TV, September 2019) Dark comedy is a tricky balance of elements, and for every dark comedy I liked, I can name you two others I didn’t—it takes a lot of skill to balance the grimness with the laughs, and many people who try only sound like complete psychopaths at the end of the process. But the alchemy holds in Eating Raoul, as singular a film as it’s possible to image. Writer-director Paul Bartel not only cooked up the script and made it happen, he also stars as half of the couple that are the film’s protagonists: Intelligent, likable, off-beat, asexual, poor and amoral, they eventually cook up a scheme to kill off “rich perverts” by posing as sex workers and luring marks to their deaths. The scheme soon spins out of control, but the joke of the film is that its eccentric characters are the heroes of the story, and no temporary disagreement is going to tear them apart. It goes all the way to the dark extreme suggested by the title, but somehow never loses its verve or its utterly deadpan humour (a more appropriate expression than most here—there’s even a joke about having separate frying pans for murder and for cooking). It’s remarkable that the film remains funny without being cloyingly comic: this is a film made for a specific audience that can learn to get the jokes rather than have them explained to them. Much of the credit for the film’s success goes to Bartel as a performer—overweight, balding, not all that photogenic, but likable all the less—and the pinup-worthy Mary Woronov as his partner in crime. On paper, Eating Raoul sounds like a repulsive mess—but on-screen, it quietly works wonders. It’s quite an achievement—and a terrific film as well.