Sunday, 5 January 2020

Persona Non Grata, French Film Festival, Dominion

Fortyish and frustrated in their ambitions,  José (Nicolas Duvauchelle) and Maxime (Raphaël Personnaz) hire Moise (Roschdy Zem) to kill their boss Eddy so they can take over the company and live the lives they feel entitled to.  Pay the murder off and they have the control they desire and an easy life ahead of them.

Except that, unfamiliar with the criminal world, they have grossly underestimated Moise's intelligence and abilities.  When he starts turning up at their offices and ordering people about there's not a lot the guilty pair are able to do about it.  With Moise dating, and manipulating, Eddy's teenage daughter the situation gets ever more complicated and the efforts of José and Maxime to buy off the hitman only dig them into an increasingly deeper hole.  Something has to give...

Zem also directed and it's his character who is the most interesting and convincing.  He's callous, violent and evil, but in such an open manner that he's almost likeable.  Certainly more than the hapless and twisted couple who hired him, and don't always feel like three dimensional characters.  However the tension is well constructed, scene by scene, with some oddball comedy thrown in for light relief (Moise gets his patsies to finance the career of an appallingly bad rapper at one point), and it's enjoyable in a predictable way.  PNG is no classic, but has enough in it to provide an entertaining ninety minutes.

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