L’ordinateur des pompes funèbres [The Probability Factor] (1976)

(On Cable TV, May 2022) Near-obscure French comedy/thriller L’ordinateur des pompes funèbres is not a particularly good movie, but it has a few period quirks that make it intermittently interesting. For one thing, it improbably makes its protagonist an insurance actuary, used to compute death percentages. For another, it describes how the protagonist comes to use his skills for evil, whipping out a lovingly portrayed Hewlett-Packard calculator to plan the most statistically probable accidental death for his unbearably shrewish wife. This being accomplished, well, what are a few more “murders” to keep improving his life? All well and good until he moves in with two very different women (each of them satisfying him in different ways) and finds out that they’re using his methods against him. As a dark comedy, the film is often a glorious paean to the mid-1970s, sometimes a constant madcap reversal of expectations, and sometimes something that feels more modern than it is. Jean-Louis Trintignant does a good job in a role that blends sympathy with pathos, while director Gérard Pirès (who would go on to direct two of the biggest French blockbusters of the turn of the century: Taxi and Les Chevaliers du Ciel) here turns in a relatively early effort. (There are also car crashes that come from – who else?—the legendary stunt coordinator Remy Julienne.)  At a bare 75 minutes, L’ordinateur des pompes funèbres doesn’t waste too much time even if there’s a noticeable gap between the initial joke, and the last big conceptual laugh. (Some of it is intentional – in tweaking expectations, the film has fun showing the financial toll and eventual dullness of a ménage à trois.)  I liked it quite a bit better than I expected – I went in expecting a naïve comedy about the early computer age and got a substantially more complex dark satire.