Compartiment tueurs (1965)
Directed by Costa-Gavras

Film Review

After working as an assistant to some of the most prominent French film directors of the day - Jacques Demy, Henri Verneuil and René Clément - Costa-Gavras made a dazzling directorial debut with this slick but totally unhinged thriller.  Showing nothing of the ponderous earnestness of the director's subsequent political thrillers (Z, L'Aveu, Missing), Compartiment tueurs is a brave stab at revitalising a familiar genre, the conventional French polar, by combining elements of traditional murder mystery, black comedy and film noir and blending these into a distinctly weird but entertaining concoction.  The film is based on a popular novel by Sébastien Japrisot, who went on to script some other noteworthy thrillers - Adieu l'ami (1968), Le Passager de la pluie (1970).

If Michel Magne's catchy theme doesn't provide an instant nostalgia hit when the film starts, the names and faces that roll over the screen in the opening credits certainly will.  With an eye-popping cast that includes not only established performers - Yves Montand, Simone Signoret and Michel Piccoli - but also rising stars Jacques Perrin, Catherine Allégret, Claude Mann, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Bernadette Lafont - Compartiment tueurs makes a virtue of its too-obvious attempt to bridge the gap between Old and New Wave, by literally bombarding the audience with acting talent from both schools.  Costa-Gavras first encountered Montand (along with his wife Signoret) whilst working as an assistant on René Clément's Le Jour et l'heure (1963).  The actor would feature in many of his subsequent films, notably  L'Aveu and État de siège (1973).  Trintignant would win the Best Actor award at Cannes for his leading role in the director's next important film, Z (1969).

Compartiment tueurs could easily have been a routine murder mystery, of the kind that French cinema audiences had been happily lapping up since the 1930s.  Instead, Costa-Gavras goes out of his way to make it anything but, deftly appropriating the familiar film noir motifs with the help of cinematographer Jean Tournier to make it a deranged, dreamlike farce, in which the investigating police (led by a laughably befuddled Yves Montand) appear powerless against a seemingly omniscient adversary that is always one step ahead of them (and with a ready bullet).  At times, it feels like a film school project that has totally lost its grip on reality, the bizarre character digressions muddling an already unimaginably convoluted plot to the point that your head feels fit to explode under the strain.

If you're going to get the maximum enjoyment out of Compartiment tueurs it's probably best not to try to keep up with the plot.  True, everything is nicely resolved in the end (thanks to a few ideas pinched from Agatha Christie), but the plot is really just one huge McGuffin and the entertainment value lies elsewhere - in the gloriously over-the-top mise-en-scène, the deliciously exaggerated performances (Charles Denner is accidentally hilarious) and the unremitting sense of fun that somehow manages to hold it all together.  Costa-Gavras clearly had as much fun sending up the policier genre as had paying homage to it, and the result is arguably his most accessible and entertaining film.  Surprisingly, the director would seldom venture into comedic territory again, doing so successfully only late in his career with his timely satires Le Couperet (2005) and Le Capital (2012).

Film Synopsis

When a sleeper train from Marseille to Paris stops at Avignon, a young woman named Benjamine Bombat climbs aboard and offers a place in her compartment to a handsome young stranger, Daniel, who has omitted to buy a ticket.  After the train's arrival in Paris the next morning, the passengers disembark - all except a young woman, Georgette Thomas, who has been strangled in her berth, which coincidentally is in the same compartment as the one occupied by Benjamine and Daniel.  Believing that the murderer may have been one of the five passengers in this very compartment, Inspector Grazziani sets about trying to contact them, assisted by his efficient subordinate Jean-Lou Gabert.

One of the passengers, a salesman named René Cabourg, is killed before Grazziani can reach him, and this is followed by the brutal murder of two other passengers - Éliane Darrès, an actress past her prime, and Rivolani, a lorry driver.  As he struggles to find a connection between the killings, Grazziani first suspects Bob Vaski, the boyfriend of the first victim, and then Éric Grandin, the lover of victim number three.  When two suspicious looking men come calling on Benjamine, Daniel urges her to seek the safety of an anonymous hotel room whilst he calls the police.  As he does so, he attracts the killer's attention and makes himself the next likely murder victim...