I Hired a Contract Killer

Germany, Sweden, Finland, United Kingdom, France

1990

79 Min

Color

1.85:1

English, Finnish

Currently 3.9/5 Stars.
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SCR Aki Kaurismäki, Peter von Bagh

CAST Jean-Pierre Léaud, Margi Clarke, Kenneth Colley, Nicky Tesco, Joe Strummer

PROD DES John Ebden

Berlinale (Forum), Stockholm (Absolute film!)

Synopsis

After fifteen years’ service, Henri Boulanger is made redundant from his job. Shocked, he attempts suicide, but can’t go through with it, so he hires a contract killer in a seedy bar to murder him at some unspecified time in the future. But almost immediately he meets and falls in love with Margaret, a flower-seller, which makes Henri realise that his life has some meaning after all. But when he goes back to the bar to cancel the contract, he finds it has been demolished – and there’s no way he can get in touch with the killer… –IMDb

Director

Aki Kaurismäki

Aki Kaurismäki did a wide variety of jobs including postman, dish-washer and film critic, before forming a production and distribution company, Villealfa (in homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)) with his older brother Mika Kaurismäki, also a film-maker. Both Aki and Mika are prolific film-makers, and together have been responsible for one-fifth of the total output of the Finnish film industry since the early 1980s, though Aki’s work has found more favour abroad. His films are very short (he says a film should never run longer than 90 minutes, and many of his films are nearer 70), eccentric parodies of various genres (road movies, film noir, rock musicals), populated by lugubrious hard-drinking Finns and set to eclectic soundtracks, typically based around ‘50s rock’n’roll.

In the 1990s he has made films in Britain (I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)) and France (La vie de bohème (1992)). —IMDb

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twodeadmagpies

11Feb11

wow. aki, léaud, a london that's never looked so lovely, and my grandfather's golf buddy, walter sparrow. bliss.

X.A. Coronel likes this

Doch Cobaina

27Oct10

looks sso Antonioni c )

Th MZA

23Sep10

No, I watched The Hired Hand (Fonda 1971, 5/5 stars), which an old pal called "the only true example of an ambient western" -- 100% accurate, though no description coulda prepared me for the visual/emotional feast. Fonda's cowboy is a dissthentic wisp torn 'tween a homely wife and range life; but Fonda the director is godlike; he lets there be light; light patiently forms images; images form a world; and it was good.