I Hired a Contract Killer

Had long wanted to see Karusmäki's only English language film, starring the quintessential Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Léaud, who's as fabulous as usual. Delighted to see it was dedicated to Michael Powell and from the red credits through Margi Clarke's red lips and roses you get that Powell red thing running throughout. In mood though, it reminded me more of Powell's better 'quota quickies' of the thirties in its brevity and wacky plot. You see Léaud puts out a hit on himself then changes his mind when he meets Clarke. Meanwhile the killer, Ken Colley, isn't feeling very well... Colley is not only still alive but features in upcoming Dan Hawk Psychic Detective. And he was in Peaky Blinders (briefly). He was a favourite of Ken Russell. Short quirky scenes and deadpan humour conspire beautifully together in a run-down looking London. Off thing though is Clarke's delivery of lines, almost like English isn't her first language. (It isn't of course - it's Liverpudlian!) Photographed by Timo Salminen. Good sound, too, from Timo Linnasalo.

Among the few Kaurismaki films I have seen so far, this is the one I think the most accessible and I strongly recommend it. My impression of it is completely vivid as I have just watched it minutes ago from the box I was offered a year ago for my 30's: a great present for movie maniacs. Kaurismaki does not film Helsinki this time, but another capital:London, with the same kind of views, the same urban landscapes, the beauty and the strangeness, the same insisting and passionate obsession than Scorsese with his New York. You still can find the same taciturnity of characters (perfect Kenneth Colley as the killer: I was glad to recognize Admiral Piett from The Empire Strikes Back), the same type of slow narration, though this time, the story is far simpler to understand upon first visualization. It deals with life and its contradictions, the preciosity of it, changes of mind and regrets, how desire between two people can make you see things differently, make you want to live on ; love regardless of social discrimination, that is so beautiful and yet so ideal! Another great point in Kaurismaki's films consists in the appropriate inclusion of a more or less famous rock music: perfect Joe Strummer, RIP. A great moment of poetry in cinema and a perfect film fit for beginners in Kaurismaki.

Very early in his career, the Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki established an aesthetic for his films in colour that has held for decades now: the characters are blue-collar people struggling to get by, and whatever emotions they feel, their lines of hatred, love, hope, or disappointment are communicated in an utterly deadpan, monotone fashion. The scenery is usually drab industrial buildings and rusting dockyards. Kaurismäki's 1990 film I HIRED A CONTRACT KILLER moves that formula, developed in his native Helsinki, to London. This is not the posh London of the royal family, bankers or socialites. Kaurismäki managed to find completely dilapidated locations that I would have never imagined to exist in London of that time (though no doubt they've long since been gentrified beyond recognition at this point). Henri Boulanger (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a timid Frenchman living in London with no apparent friends or surviving family, has worked for fifteen years for a state utility. When he is made redundant in a bit of Thatcher-era privatization, he feels he has nothing more to live for. He attempts suicide twice, both tries ending in morbidly humorous failure, and he lacks the courage to try any further. He decides to enter the East End criminal underworld and to hire a paid assassin to kill him. The mob boss takes Henri's money and tells him it will be done through a subcontractor. But when Henri meets the lovely Margaret (Margi Clarke) and starts coming out of his shell, he suddenly has second thoughts. Unable to call off the job, he and Margaret try to evade the hit-man (Kenneth Colley), already on Boulanger's trail. Kaurismäki's films are, to a large extent, dark comedies, and there are some laughs here. I also appreciated the element of homage to Kaurismäki's forebears and peers here. Colley's sad hit-man and the way the shots frame him was surely drawn from the crime capers that Jean-Pierre Melville shot in his last years. Kaurismäki's perennial love for drab scenery had been boosted by his newly established friendship with Jim Jarmusch, a director who presented America at this time as so many vacant lots and abandoned buildings. Still, I wouldn't consider this among Kaurismäki's best work. One of the things that makes Kaurismäki's main, Finnish-language output so hilarious is that the characters speak in literary Finnish (nearly a different language than colloquial Finnish). When the dialogue is in English and with a mix of UK accents, the formula is not quite as effective. Jean-Pierre Léaud's English is almost incomprehensible -- the actor has been a titan of French film since the New Wave of Truffaut and Godard, but he's not proficient enough in English to do English-language cinema. Kaurismäki no doubt wanted intended the character to sound that way, but it feels off for this viewer. I'd recommend this film only to those who have enjoyed a series of Kaurismäki's stronger films.

The premise of this film is funny and odd: an employee of a British company loses his job, and because there is nothing to life for, he decides to end it right there. But all the attempts on his own life fail. Still determined, he decides to hire a contract killer - and have himself murdered. While waiting for the executioner in his apartment, he grows bored and decides to visit a bar across the street. There he indulges himself, for the first time, in hard liquor and cigarettes. As if this wouldn't be upsetting enough to his short remaining life span, he meets a flower girl with blood-red lips. Resolutely, he demands that she sits next to him, and inevitably falls in love. All over sudden, life isn't so despicable anymore - what to do? The contract killer is still on his heels... Kaurismäki takes this story as an occasion to revive his cinematic universe: people standing at a bar and slowly lifting a glass of beer, others sitting in front of worn-out wallpapers while smoking a cigarette. The camera lingers as if those quiet moments were a subtle study of humans on the fringes of society. They are connected through the central theme of the film, but the main focus lies on Henri Boulanger, the former employee. Stoically and with a deadpan face, he undergoes the metamorphosis of his existence, subtly expressing his newfound hunger for life. Standing in a bar and listening to an unknown guitarist (Joe Strummer), he lifts his drink and takes a long gulp. From all we know, this is the equivalent of a spontaneous expression of joy in Finland. You are required to observe and listen quite carefully, but if you do, this very refrained way of celebrating the small pleasures of everyday life is not less powerful, especially against the background of Henri's rather meaningless existence. Kaursimäki doesn't need any loud effects or tearful scenes to convince us, he doesn't even need dialogue, of which there is very little in the film. He tells the story purely through the images and the strong, yet sparing expressions of his protagonists. The lighting of the scenes is somber and full of strong contrasts, giving the film it's own unique visual mark. I Hired a Contract Killer is like a slow burning fire that still provides warmth long after the big fireworks are spent.

Aki Kaurismäki, like all true film auteurs, creates worlds. Not in the sci-fi fantasy sense — though, I am not excluding sci-fi, merely broadening the concept — but in the subjective sense. Like Jarmusch, Fassbinder and Lynch, you get a feeling while watching a Kaurismäki movie that you are watching something highly personal. And so it goes with his odd and amusing love story, I Hired a Contract Killer, about a man who wants to kill himself but reconsiders after falling in love. Roll your eyes and say you've seen that kind of movie before, but with Kaurismäki at the helm you get something genuinely touching, without forced pathos, incidental-music, or faux-inspirational endings. Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, the French nouvelle vague star of such movies as American Night and 400 blows, IHCK moves us from Kaurismäki's usual film location in Helsinki to London. Like the down-and-out squalor of Kaurismäki's working class neighborhoods in Helsinki, the London depicted here isn't the refined upper-class cosmopolis depicted in Woody Allen's latest movies, rather it's a drab, trash-strewn working class London full of thugs and hard-drinking wage slaves. Jean-Pierre is plays Frenchman named Henri, who was spent the las 15 years of his life working for the same boring English company. Because of financial difficulties, his job has become redundant, and "foreigners" are the first ones to get the ax. Distraught — for his rote day job was the only thing that kept him from self-reflection — Henri decides to kill himself. He attempts to hang himself, fails when the rope snaps; so he tries to gas himself, but a gas strike that day leaves him without gas. The next day he reads an article about hit men operating in the city, and decides to hire a hit-man to do the job. He finds a lowdown bar in the roughest part of London and ridiculously goes to the bar and orders a ginger ale, much to the derision of the roughnecks around him. He announces, in his strong French accent, that "where I come from, veee eeet people like you for breakfast". This seems to calm suspicions. He finally meets the underworld boss and hires a contract killer. He spends the next hours anticipating his imminent death by constantly looking over his shoulder and providing clues for the hit-man to find him. One such clue is a note on his front door, indicating that he has gone out for a pint in the bar across the street. The very night that the hit-man is about to finish his job, he meets Margaret, a young women selling roses, and — in typically quirky Kaurismäki fashion — immediately falls in love. After barely evading the hit-man that night, he decides to call off the job. So he goes back to the bar from where he hired him, and, rather hilariously, it has burned down. This is probably the most Hitchcockian Kaurismäki has ever gotten, but it's an amusing and suspenseful plot device. Henri and Margaret spend the rest of the movie one step ahead of the hit-man, moving from her small apartment to a hotel, and finally with Henri going on the lamb when he finds himself unfairly implicated in a neighborhood hold up. Much like the characters in Jarmush's Down by Law, Henri becomes an innocent man with just about everybody against him — and, like Jarmush, Kaurismäki manages to make all his characters endearing and subtly humorous. This great mashup of an absurd, Kafka-esquire world, nearly-Hitchcockian suspense, and gentle humor, make this a not just a gangster movie parody, or a run-of-the mill love story, but truly, a movie with heart.

Finnish movies are often blamed (at least by Finns themselves) for containing very weak emotions and total lack of good humor. In my opinion, this movie gives a great deal of both. The main character is an immigrant who loses his job and while swimming in depression, he tries to kill himself (and fails on it, too). The movie gets great after the point where our hero hires an contract killer to kill him. Since his life is already lost (and the killer is going to kill him anytime), he begins to sink more and more into misery just when... he falls in love. Suddenly, life isn't so bad anymore - too bad that the killer is still shadowing him and just trying to finish the contract they've made. I just simply LOVE this movie, it is so funny and yet so good parody about all Finnish customs and traditions.

The settings are suitably grim and grimy. Most of the cast are oddly antisocial enough to fit neatly into the Kaurismaki vision of sixties' London bleakness. Jean-Pierre Leaud is morbidly deadpan in a truly Finnish way. Kenneth Colley is a wistful hit-man par excellence. The stifling dullness of the Orwellian ministry and the heartstopping nature of abrupt redundancy are beautifully drawn. The only thing that drags this movie down from Kaurismaki's usual lofty heights of cruel farce is the awful wooden performance by Margi Clarke as the "love" interest. I have no idea why she was chosen ahead of the other 3 billion women on the planet to play the role, but she stinks up the place something rotten. She is so grimly unconvincing that I was grinding my teeth within ten minutes of her introduction. What should have been a brilliant dark comedy was turned into a dire soap episode by an artless performance of hitherto unimaginable ineptitude. It would appear that sublime irony is not her strongpoint. Nor is holding onto a single convincing accent for the duration. From Liverpool to Roedean in an hour. Hello nosebleed. I've seen her play her usual gobby scouser part in innumerable "gritty" TV dramas, and found her bearable at worst. But here, she kills the atmosphere stone dead with her awful timing and dismal delivery. If only her performance was a joke of the "so bad it's good variety", but it isn't. It's just lame. I'm assuming that Aki cast her on the strength of Letter to Brezhnev or his brother's Helsinki-Napoli, but rarely has anyone been so wretchedly miscast in any of his movies. Even Joe Strummer comes out smelling of roses(and beer and cigs). A real shame, because the mood of the movie is fantastic. The props and locations are homages to a London long since redeveloped. The giant Corona bottle in the pub is a particularly neat touch. As is the fact that everyone's smoking Players and Capstans. Worth a remake with a decent actress who has some understanding of irony and understatement.

Great movie. Based on the story by Jules Verne Les Tribulations d'un chinois en Chine, Kaurismaki surprise us again with his strange humorous style. A story about feelings in an inexpressive way; don't mind how blue you can feel, there's always a place for love and hope. People and their contradictions; a man who don't want to live, contracts a killer who don't want to die. If you have seen any Kaurismaki's films, you should know that they are different; His way of filming and his stories are not "normal" in the commercial way; he seems to keep the distances with the characters, and that could be annoying for some people; but if you like it, you will love all his films. Kaurismaki is a genius, and he is funny too.

The premise is so stupid -- guy is such a failure that he can't even kill himself, so he hires a contract killer to do it for him. Then he falls in love and changes his mind. Really, I can't emphasise enough how bad this movie is. It's not "so bad it's good", it's so bad it's BAD. But I still remember it after all these years so it must have struck some sort of chord. P.S. Has Warren Beatty seen this movie? Because the same plot starts off Bulworth.

I only saw this movie once, over a decade ago. It was horrible. Noone laughed or even smiled in it, all the scenery was bleak, the story was depressing, and it almost made the audience feel suicidal as well (like the protagonist). But, with each passing year, I like this movie more. I'm very much looking forward to seeing it again. It actually is a great comedy, but it took me years to understand that. Should you see it? Definitely. I still remember this obscure movie after over 10 years and although I hated it at first. It inspired me enough to write this comment here. About how many movies can you say that?