Louise-Michel

A film for anyone who has ever been given the boot, ‘Louise-Michel’ sees French sick puppies Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine (‘Aaltra’) building a delightfully uncouth comedy around the closure of a small French toy factory. Named after a female French anarchist (who, in a closing quotation, demands we grind down the rich into ‘pig hash’), the film sees illiterate male-to-female transsexual Louise (the wonderful Yolande Moreau) convince her redundant workmates to pool their severance pay and employ a hitman to whack the miserly boss. Simple. Enter Michel (Bouli Lanners) , a dimwitted female-to-male transsexual with a vast collection of bespoke pistols, but no backbone: he takes down his targets by convincing terminal patients they should go out with a bang. The jocular, bad-taste comic set-pieces and wittily caricatured side-players mount up (soundtracked by Daniel Johnston, no less), but this tale of two genderless freaks fighting the good fight for the little man also offers a rousing reminder of the power (and eccentricities) of the pissed-off proletariat.