Jean-Louis Trintignant

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

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Amour (2012)

    Amour (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, October 2019) The real horror movies aren’t always marketed as such. In Amour, for instance, we’ve got a near-intolerable depiction of a realistic and heartbreaking situation: an elderly man having to take care of a severely disabled partner at the very end of their lives. There’s no way it will end well, as either the premise or the opening moments of the film suggest. Much of the two-hour film is a steady descent into the inevitability of death and there’s nothing remotely fun about it. In Michael Haneke’s usual style, the camera lingers long before, during and after the main point of a scene has been made: there isn’t much of a plot despite the film’s running time, and that makes the experience even more harrowing. Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant are heartbreaking as a committed couple who end up suffering through no fault of their own except for the breakdown of human bodies. Despite the straightforward plot, Amour is a lot to take in because it deals in inevitabilities. No genre element, no fantastic creature we can deny: just what happens to a lot of us as we age. If the film has any upside, it’s to make the thought of dying alone seem almost like a happy ending considering the alternative.