DEAD IN FRANCE

Who ever said retirement brings with it peace?

That's definitely not the case for Charles (Brian Levine), a British contract killer who - after scoring his 100th hit - just wants to quietly resign from his duties. He's halfway there: he lives in a plush villa in Cannes and has entered the realms of respectability by hiring a cleaner called Lisa (Celia Muir).

She's a no-nonsense Cockney abroad but she hits it off with the well-spoken, socially awkward Charles and gets the job of scrubbing his place clean while he's out.

Charles leaves her to it and pays a visit to an old competitor, Burgess (Ray Ash). It turns out these two have crossed each other in the past and, now that he's retiring, Charles wants to tie up loose ends. He's there to kill Burgess. However, his adversary manages to buy his life by offering to hand over his nest egg of 2 million pounds to Charles.

Leaving with the loot, Charles then rings his other old foe, Clancy (Kate Loustau). She's a psychopathic killer back home in Blighty who has a serious grudge against him. Charles tries to make amends with her over the telephone but to no avail: instead, she sets about torturing his UK contacts in a bid to discover his whereabouts.

On his way home, Charles stops off on a Cannes pier to look into blowing some of his fresh booty on a yacht. Unfortunately the English salesman he speaks to, Simon (Lee Cheney), is a con-man who arranges with his thieving brother to pinch their stooge's car. Of course, the stooge being Charles, they're delighted to discover 2 million pounds sitting in his car's boot...

So, Charles is having a bad day. All he wants to do is retrieve his money and get home so he can invite Lisa to have a couple of unwinding drinks with him. Alas, this plot is even more involved than it may at first seem: Lisa and her boyfriend Denny (Darren Bransford) have their own agenda.

Explosions are a given when all of these disparate characters are brought together.

Double-crosses, unlikely coincidences and convoluted character comedy-drama are the order of the day here. It all more-or-less succeeds because of director/co-writer (alongside Levine, writing under the pseudonym Jack Hillgate) Kris McManus's willingness to push things that little too far.

I mean, this film is clearly a product of the Guy Ritchie/Quentin Tarantino school of thinking (albeit a very small budgeted one). It has hip dialogue, too much swearing and even those annoying text introductions to key characters ("The Hitman", "The Cleaner", "The Thief" and so on). But Ritchie might fall shy of characters' heads blowing off and villains receiving graphic knifings to their eye. While Tarantino may well share McManus' ability to elicit genuine laughs from scenes of shoes thrown at faces, noses broken with pistol butts, and a build-up of hostages crying from behind their gags ... but I've yet to see him shoot something as beguilingly splendid as this black-and-white feature.

Obviously the Cannes setting benefits the film greatly, as many of its landscapes are captured beautifully here. And the stunning aesthetics are matched by a varied, accomplished and always enjoyably retro-like score from Adam Langston.

Certainly, bits of McManus' film are clichéd and the fact that a lot of the actors don't understand the concept of 'deadpan' does undermine the comedy somewhat. But I found the film to be brisk, often funny and enjoyable - and who can argue when we get an energetic montage of Bransford fucking the ultra-fit Muir in various ways, within the first half-hour?!

DEAD IN FRANCE is being released on US DVD by fringe US distributor Breaking Glass Pictures.

The screener disc provided was a water-marked early tester affair. As a result, it didn't contain any menus, chapters or extras and the picture/audio quality may well not be representative of what their final retail disc offers.

With that caveat highlighted, the picture on the test disc was generally good. The stark monochrome photography was ably assisted by strong contrast and fine image detail. It must be mentioned that some sequences suffered from compression issues, where blacks would briefly become very blocky and digital noise prevailed. As I say though, these problems probably don't materialise in the retail disc: but they will commented upon if we get sent badly authored screener discs.

The 2.0 audio track provided was very clean and reliable throughout playback. Most of the dialogue is in English but burned-in subtitles were provided for the occasional forays into French. These were well-written and always easy to read.

Apparently the retail DVD will also contain a gag reel and deleted scenes.

DEAD IN FRANCE is a good-looking, cheap but ambitious comedy thriller that successfully combines dark humour with a clutch of deliciously malicious characters. It's also probably the best film to have been set in Cannes since THE LAST HORROR FILM. Make of that what you will!

Review by Stuart Willis