Wild Target (Pierre Salvadori, 1993)

 

Pierre Salvadori’s Wild Target is a low-profile entry in cinema’s bizarre surfeit of comedies focusing on the hitman trade, etching strictly minor variations on the done-to-death concepts. In concept, its main character Victor (Jean Rochefort) is a deeply sad character, who we understand was basically forced into the family business by dominatingly cold-hearted parents (his mother's in a care home but still knocking off the odd person); he’s now in his fifties and still unsure about his sexuality (the movie has a distinctly homophobic vein), his obsessions and tics rendering him all but incapable of spontaneous enjoyment. On impulse, he decides not to kill Antoine (Guillaume Depardieu), a delivery man who inadvertently witnesses one of his kills, taking him on an as an apprentice instead (the movie omits the scene in which the men reach this unlikely pact, as it would probably be impossible to make it even vaguely persuasive), and then also can’t bring himself to finish off his next target Renee (Marie Trintignant), who’s flagrantly placed herself on a gangster’s wrong side by selling him a forged painting on which the paint wasn’t even dry, the three of them becoming the targets of the gangster’s henchmen and his replacement hired killers. There’s a lot of potential fun to be had in persistent amorality, but that’s not realized here: much of what’s presumably intended as deadpan seems merely low-energy, and one often wonders whether the actors are even aware of each other. That’s a particular shame given the sad resonances attaching to both Depardieu (seen here just a couple of years before a fateful motorcycle accident that contributed to his death at 37) and Trintignant (murdered some ten years later by her boyfriend); in a better film so preoccupied with death, their presence might have been heart-rending, rather than shrug-inducing.