A Pain in the Ass (1973)

A Pain in the Ass is the kind of comedy-drama that feels like a perfectly tuned machine: a cool, methodical hitman’s precision colliding, scene after scene, with the messy unpredictability of a stranger’s heartbreak. Édouard Molinaro stages the hotel like a pressure cooker, letting suspense and farce share the same cramped walls, while Lino Ventura’s granite calm plays beautifully against Jacques Brel’s raw, needy volatility in a pairing that’s funnier the more seriously it’s played. The vibe is classic French: brisk, tightly constructed, and wickedly human, where laughter comes from character and timing rather than winks at the audience. It’s not for everyone—there’s a suicide attempt and some violence played in a darkly comic register—but if you enjoy humor that grows out of desperation and bad luck, this one delivers with style and surprising warmth.

A Pain in the Ass is aiming for that classic French farce setup: a cool, methodical hitman forced to babysit a needy, emotionally collapsing neighbor while trying to do his job. When it works, Lino Ventura’s deadpan irritation bouncing off Jacques Brel’s frantic despair creates some genuinely funny tension, and the hotel-room chaos has solid comic timing. But the humor is very much of its era—broad, repetitive, and built around a suicide attempt played for complications—so if you’re sensitive to self-harm being used as a plot engine, it may feel uncomfortable rather than clever. If you want a tighter, darker crime-comedy or modern pacing, you’ll likely find it drawn out, but if you enjoy old-school European mishap comedy with a slightly nasty edge, it can still be an entertaining time capsule.