Entr’acte: On Screen, Globalization and a Deadly Discontent

PARIS Mass murderers, rampaging psychotics, killer spouses, even arsenic-dispensing old aunts have long been served up as entertainment by the movie industry. And politics too, of course, have contributed to the lexicon of screen violence through terrorism, revolutions, coups d'état, invasions and wars.

Is no excuse for movie violence taboo?

Constantin Costa-Gavras, a Greek-born director who lives in Paris, may have found one.

Now 71, Costa-Gavras has made his name with thrillers set against violent political backgrounds, such as "Z," "The Confession," "State of Siege," "Missing" and "Amen." Striking a horizon of targets, from dictatorships of left and right to the Vatican's ambiguous response to the Holocaust, he has grown used to complaints about his political take on history.

With his latest movie, however, he has entered new territory. "Le Couperet" is another thriller, but this time set against a violent economic background. It presents murder as an allegory for the human toll of globalization. And it is happening today.

When the screenplay was ready and financing was being sought, French movie investors found all this too close to reality and refused to back the project. For a while, it looked like the film would never be made.

The plot follows Bruno Davert, a forty-something paper mill executive who loses his job after his company transfers some of its operations abroad. Now, three years of unemployment later, his despair is mounting. And when an appropriate job opening finally appears, he realizes he has several competitors. Following his own Darwinian rules, he sets out to kill them, one by one.

"Le Couperet" means "the blade of the guillotine," said Michèle Ray, the movie's producer, who is married to Costa-Gavras, "but it also means the Sword of Damocles."

"When we were looking for money for the film in France, we were told that no one would want to see a film that reminded people that their own jobs were also threatened by globalization," she said.

The point, of course, is that Bruno, played by José García, could be the guy next door - not the killer next door, but the long-term unemployed who spends his day sending off résumés and waiting for the mailman.

Certainly, what the French call "liberalization" - economic deregulation, outsourcing of jobs to low-cost countries, even the transfer of entire factories abroad - has become the political issue in France as well as in much of Western Europe. And while the French government constantly reassures its labor force, the specter and reality of midlife layoffs continue to haunt many people here.

Yet, topical as it may seem, "Le Couperet" is not originally a French story, which only goes to show that globalization is, well, global.

Rather, the movie is adapted from Donald Westlake's 1998 thriller, "The Ax," which recounts a similar tale of a downsized executive-turned-serial killer in the United States. "The Ax" even seemed destined for American screens: Paramount Pictures took a five-year option on the movie rights, developed a script and chose a director. But, for lack of financing, the project was abandoned.

In 2003, Westlake sold the rights to Ray's company to make a French-language version.

"Costa read the book in English and really wanted to make this film," Ray recalled. "I told him, 'Let's wait because they'll never make it in the United States.' But when we couldn't finance our film here, we also knew there was no point in going to the American studios. In the end, we made it as if it were a first film, as a co-production with people in Belgium, Spain and later France."

In an interview, Costa-Gavras said that, of the many Westlake mystery novels he has read, he found "The Ax" the most pertinent to France today.

"Essentially, the middle classes are suffering, which is new in our time," he said. "The guy in the film, he's educated, experienced, but he is no longer respected. Now the shareholders are the important thing. This is new in France and Europe."

This middle-class dimension is reflected in the movie's leafy suburban locations, many of them filmed in Liège, Belgium. Bruno's own home is comfortable, his wife elegant, his children seemingly well behaved. But unemployment brings tensions to the home, Bruno's marriage suffers, his self-esteem collapses and he goes off the rails.

He then starts killing people like himself - or the guy next door.

"In the book, the character takes pleasure in killing and kills in a very aggressive way," Costa-Gavras explained. "I dropped this and showed that he is not happy with what he does. I made his family relationships stronger and I changed the ending."

A trickier question was how audiences should respond to Bruno. "My idea was to show him very negatively at the beginning," Costa-Gavras said, referring to the opening scenes, which are a flashback to Bruno's first two murders, "but then viewers grow curious and eventually sympathize with him."

"This is a genre film, not realistic," he said. "The audience believes what happens to him, they see him as a victim, but they don't believe what he does."

So, reassuringly, not every middle-aged out-of-work depressive is about to turn killer. But the economic conditions that transformed Bruno are increasingly common not only in the United States and Western Europe, but also in Japan and even South Korea, where Costa-Gavras's film may soon be remade in Korean.

When it was released here last spring, "Le Couperet" did respectably (it drew 650,000 spectators in France compared with, say, 1.5 million for "Amen"). And while its disturbing plot appears to have precluded pre-production sales in other countries based only on the screenplay, the movie is scheduled to open in several European and Latin American countries in the coming months.

"But no one has shown any interest in the United States," Ray said. "It's not a question of negotiations: there has been no offer. Is it the subject? I don't know. Investors were certainly put off here. Is it because it is not a typical 'French film?' Costa doesn't make French films. You could say that this is an American film made in French."

Costa-Gavras noted that the movie was well received when it was shown at the San Francisco Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last spring. On the other hand, his movies have always been well received in festivals.

The film's problem may lie elsewhere: It addresses a particularly French anxiety about where globalization is leading the country. As Bruno puts it, it is becoming a world of "everyone for himself." And, of course, Americans already know that.