WILD TARGET (Directed by Pierre Salvadori. Starring Jean Rochefort, Marie Trintigant, Guillaume Depardieu)

Hitmen may be the movie’s latest fad (see Offscreen), but their implacable image will be hard pressed to survive the assault of this quirky, immensely likeable French farce. Veteran Jean Rochefort, who has impressed as the fetishistic lover in The Hairdresser’s Husband and the mannered old queen in Le Parfum D’Yvonne, has the usual hitman’s immaculately groomed appearance and poker face, but this is revealed to be a facet not so much of icy coolness as extreme anal retention. He even labels the tins of food in his hideout with the day on which he will eat them. He’s an ageing bachelor, mother’s boy and all round fuss budget, whose carefully ordered existence starts to fall apart when he adopts witness Guillaume (son of Gerard) Depardieu as his apprentice (it’s that old plot line again) and then falls for his next victim Marie (I wonder if by any chance she is related to Jean Louis) Trintigant (that even older one!).

Essaying familiar terrain that threatens to become even more familiar over the next few months, Wild Target rises above its material with a combination of black farce, knowing genre pastiche and an underlying sense of wistful romance. Jean Rochefort’s deadpan comic timing and exquisite sense of repressed emotion wins sympathy for a character who is one part Alan Delon’s Samourai and one part Inspector Clouseau. While it lacks any great purpose other than making you laugh, it so skilfully mocks the cliches of the genre that one wonders how the next batch of hit men intend to transcend them. Murder most amusing.