How to Make a Killing: French farce of the old school

If there’s a French equivalent of English actress Olivia Colman, it’s probably the equally popular Laure Calamy.

She made her name in the TV series Call My Agent, playing that all-too French character, the mousey secretary with a crush on her boss, who suddenly gets what she wants.

And Calamy’s been playing that role on one or two movies a year ever since.Films like Antoinette in the Cevennes, Two Tickets to Greece and It’s Raining Men.

This year’s outing is called How to Make a Killing.

Well, that’s what it’s called here. At home, it’s the more graphic A Bear in La Jura - an Alpine district, where Cathy and her husband Michel own a struggling timber-yard.

A few days before Christmas, the taciturn Michel is driving in the hills when disaster!A big black bear! He swerves to avoid it.

And in avoiding it, he skids into a tourist couple parked nearby, accidentally killing both of them.

And more shock follows when he discovers a bag full of two million euros in their car.So, he goes home to tell the wife, being that sort of person.

And while Calamy as Cathy will be providing much of the performance horse-power in How to Make a Killing, the brains of the outfit is deadpan Franck Dubosc, who not only plays Michel, but also wrote and directed the film.

It’s a French farce of the old school in which everything leads to something new.

The bear, the crash, the two bodies – don’t worry there are more bodies to come – the Pakistani refugees escaping the bear, and the police on everyone’s tail.

And don’t forget, this is all taking place in the Alps at Christmas. The police investigation has to keep being put on hold to make room for family dinners.And nobody has quite enough money to cover the expenses.

Law-abiding Michel wants to confess all, hand over the money and throw himself on the mercy of the police.Cathy is made of sterner stuff and wants to hang onto the money for as long as possible, if not longer.

Particularly when they discover the two accident victims weren’t innocent tourists but notorious gangsters.

People smugglers perhaps – the Pakistani refugees, remember?Or something more drug-related?

Meanwhile that secret stash of 2 million Euros keeps moving around like a big Pass The Parcel. And everywhere it goes it keeps getting a little smaller.

As the plot thickens – and believe me, I’ve barely stirred the pot-au-feu of How to Make a Killing – it gets increasingly farcical and increasingly French.‘

When Cathy and Michel need an alibi, they decide to call on old school friend Sabine, who runs the local swingers’ nightclub.

I think it’s unlikely that an Olivia Colman comedy would feature long scenes of writhing nudity, with graphic genitalia on the wall behind our bourgeois couple.

Or feature the sudden arrival of a hitman called The Iroquois who looks like a young Alain Delon.

How to Make a Killing is long for a comedy – pushing two hours, but it never flags, all the characters get what’s coming to them - good or ill - and for David Attenborough fans, there’s a particularly striking European black bear – quite a different shape to the American varieties we’re used to.

And for me it was worth the price of admission to see Calamy and Dubosc trying to convince the police they’re enthusiastic patrons of the Cupid club. Particularly Thursday - gang bang night.