I haven’t seen the British remake of the French comedy Wild Target, which opens on 18 June, and is directed by Jonathan Lynn, who cut his teeth writing Yes, Minister. The distributor arranged a single press screening a few weeks ago, which some might interpret as a sign of its less-than-fulsome belief in the movie’s worth.
Me? I couldn’t possibly comment. (Leslie Felperin, writing in the trade paper Variety, called the new picture “unlovable” and “seldom funny”.)
However, I do hold the 1993 original in high esteem. It’s a nimble farce about a prim gentleman-assassin (Jean Rochefort) whose ordered life is disturbed when he meets an elegant thief (Marie-Louis Trintignant) and a guileless young goofball (Guillaume Depardieu). The remake stars Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt and Rupert Grint in those main roles. I wonder if these actors were forewarned about the Wild Target curse.
We are used to hearing about productions which acquire “cursed” status because the misfortune quota during or after their completion is higher than the norm (and the film industry norm is pretty high as it is). It’s usually horror films on which it never rains but it pours — The Omen, The Exorcist, the Poltergeist trilogy and Rosemary’s Baby being among the most notorious.
The implication is that dalliances with the supernatural can be dangerous to a filmmaker’s health, incurring the wrath of some Satanic PR department that doesn’t take kindly to mere mortals reporting on the lofty work of Beelzebub. You’ll find a lot of US publicists operate on the same principle. That said, the accidents which befell those associated with The Omen — shootings, bombings, plane crashes — sound a bit too tame to be the work of any self-respecting Hollywood PR.
But if making a horror movie pisses off the red guy with the horns and the pitchfork, what on earth could a well-paced, effervescent French comedy have done to stir up a karmic shitstorm? Whatever it was, life did not go smoothly for the principal cast members, post-Wild Target.
Marie Trintignant died in 2003, aged 41, after a blow to the head from her partner, Bertrand Cantat, lead singer with the band Noir Désir. She was five days from completing the filming of Colette, a mini-series about the French novelist which she had co-written with her mother, who was also directing.
Guillaume Depardieu was no luckier. The actor, whose relationship with his father Gérard might have been called tempestuous if only it hadn’t made the average tempest look like a refreshing summer breeze, already had a history of drug addiction when he came to Wild Target; he also admitted in his 2004 autobiography, Tout Donner (“Giving Everything”), to having worked as a teenage prostitute, sometimes simply to earn his train fare home. But it was a motorcycle accident in 1995 which began a protracted period of suffering that ended in his death. After 17 operations, then the amputation of his right leg after he picked up an infection in hospital, Depardieu died of pneumonia in 2008, aged 37.
Jean Rochefort may not have been quite as unfortunate as his co-stars. But when he suffered a herniated disc in 2000 while shooting Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, this became one of the key factors in that movie’s collapse, as documented in the riveting documentary Lost in La Mancha. (Gilliam’s film is rumoured to be a reality again at last, with Robert Duvall and Ewan McGregor replacing Rochefort and Johnny Depp.)
Rochefort is a witty and nuanced performer whose career encompasses work with Buñuel, Chabrol, Patrice Leconte and Bertrand Tavernier. But perhaps we should take his willing involvement in Mr Bean’s Holiday as further proof of the detrimental effect Wild Target has had on the careers and lives of those who made it.
Of course, it’s all mumbo-jumbo. Take any group of people and chart their fortunes over time and eventually you’ll turn up a liberal share of bad tidings. But watching the first Wild Target now becomes an unavoidably bittersweet experience because of what followed. And I include in that the subsequent career of the picture’s writer-director, Pierre Salvadori , whose first two films marked him out as an appetising mix of Bertrand Blier and Billy Wilder.
After Wild Target, Salvadori made Les Apprentis, which was even better — a downbeat comedy (of sorts) about two sad-sack friends slipping almost imperceptibly into the gutter. The picture’s plangent tone is epitomised by a beautiful opening credits sequence: a series of dissolves on an apartment door which mark the passing of four years, accompanied by the voice of Antoine (Francois Cluzet) as he spends those years trying to compose a letter to the woman who left him. Depardieu plays the gangly loafer Fred, Antoine’s flatmate, who memorably tells the woman of his dreams: “When I’m next to you, I think I should have a bath.”
Salvadori has worked intermittently since then (he had a minor hit with the romantic comedy Priceless, starring Audrey Tautou). And better that he hit his peak with that initial one-two than never at all. But when you consider the promise that just seemed to evaporate, it’s hard not to think: “Curses!”
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