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Victor (Rochefort) is a middle-aged hit-man and a self-improver who keeps a fastidiously ordered life. When a naive young messenger (Depardieu) accidentally mixes himself up in Victor's affairs, he keeps him, trains him up, and softens up; enough, at least, to balk at his next assignment (Trintignant), a wanton fellow rogue, art forger and thief. And thus the three are forced to team up to top the man who ordered her killed. Salvadori's debut feature, which he also wrote, is a winning well-directed combination of deadpan black farce, knowing genre comedy and wistful romantic triangle. Anchoring the film is another of Rochefort's superb portrayals of the haut bourgeois whose very inscrutability and repression engender sympathy and amusement in equal portion. As his dignity is eroded in a knockabout farce around the streets of Paris, his emotions begin to unbutton. This situation comedy is fine, but the film's bid for pathos fails, amid sideswipes at sexual manners only the French will ken. But it ends with such ridiculous symmetry that you'll forgive it.