LE COUPERET (THE AX)
Director: Costa-Gavras Stars: Jose Garcia, Karin Viard
Reviewed by PETER KRAUSZ
Costa-Gavras is a superb political film-maker who polarizes his audience, even if the narrative isn’t directly elated to politics. Z (69) and State Of Siege (73) were compelling political “docu-dramas” that presented military and personal struggles in a finely honed way, forcing the audience to wrestle with the ideas evoked. Missing (82) continued the political focus, tailoring the story for a broader Western sensibility, while The Music Box (89) turned the political into the personal. Mad City (97) was an American based attack on corporate greed and the media culminating in a circus-like climax set in a museum.
Gavras has now turned his eye to the same corporate culture in The Ax, but this time he investigates the impact on individuals of capitalist policies that lead to competitive employment and mass unemployment. Indeed, the dog-eat-dog nature of corporate employment is brought into focus via Jose Garcia, who plays a chemical engineer forced out of work through redundancy and is finding it extremely difficult to get a new job. However, when he is short-listed for a reasonable job, he discovers, in a cleverly malevolent way, that there are 5 other short-listed contenders for that job. Knowing that it is tough to compete with the younger, brasher executives who would more likely get the job, he takes matters into his own hands and decides to eliminate the competition.
By turns this film is deliriously black, very funny and redolent with social commentary about capitalism gone mad. Karin Viard plays Garcia’s wife who at first is blissfully unaware about what is happening around her husband, but as the murders occur, senses something may be up. This is superb, political, blackly comic film-making at its best, somewhat reminiscent of Hitchcock, but imbued with a greater sense of irony and social criticism.
A cautionary tale with a delightful conclusion, which will have audiences arguing, The Ax is a major highlight this year and is not to be missed.
Score: 9.5/10
Reviewed by Wendy Rawady
Costa-Gavras’ latest, The Ax, is a thriller with twists, laughs and relevance.
Seen a job advertised in the paper you’d kill to get? No, really, I mean KILL for? This is the crux of the novel The Ax from Donald Westlake (the New York writer responsible for The Grifters, and dozens of other stories) and it is sharply honed to keep the audience on the edge of its collective seat. Like Hitchcock’s films, there are some bitter little laughs in there, and they don’t all relate - in a slapstick way - to the clumsy attempts of Bruno, long-term chomage recipient, to kill all those standing between him and a job.
Bruno, the "hero" of the story is locked into his own prison – the need for an expensive infrastructure to retain the status quo of his middle class family. One can ask: "Why not just sell the family home and scale down?" But this is a complex option for a man with two children in their teens. The convoluted problems of current lifestyles which, as shown through the billboards, border on pornography in the need for gratification, and the difficulty in accepting a change in circumstances are explored with subtlety and wit. Funniest for me were the marriage counsellor scenes. But all are tinged with the bitter truth that corporate loyalty is rare, and does not exist when nameless shareholders are all going for the same jobs, most of which have been sent "off-shore" (in a landlocked way) to Romania and Czechoslovakia, where the peasants work for peanuts.
More of that I shall not say as any spoilers will ruin the ride for you.
However, The Ax really shows that a practised hand, veteran director Costa-Gavras, is at the helm here, with a production team to match, including the Dardenne brothers as executive producers, and probably the grooviest grandmother in the world, Michéle Ray-Gavras, as producer. The film has such panache – in the music, the production design and the consumerist (paper) posters that punctuate the story as billboards scattered throughout each location. The control in the environment builds The Ax into a significant social comment in so many layers – from the continually changing musical score to the Euro phenomenon of Germans, Belgians and French.
The question remains: when will be public grow up and ditch all the donner und blitzen of those big predictable, storyless films and choose something like The Ax for their Saturday nights out?
The Ax is a very commercial offering. Black humour in droves with witty and convincing performances across the entire cast! Don’t miss it!