Louise - Michel

French anarcho-surrealist directors de Ververn and Delépine (Aaltra) present this outré odd-couple comedy about a factory worker out for revenge and the inept hitman she bonds with.

After a children’s clothes factory closes, leaving its female staff jobless, taciturn ex-con worker Louise (Yolande Moreau) suggests the workers spend their pooled money on a worthy cause – killing the boss that put them in this mess. She recruits a likely hitman: Michel (Eldorado actor-director Bouli Lanners), an inept security specialist who subcontracts the hit to a series of wildly inappropriate stand-in assassins.

Dada-esque sight gags abound, political correctness is comprehensively shredded, and cameo appearances include chanteur and Belgian cinema’s bad boy Benoît Poelvoorde as a demented 9/11 conspiracy theorist and Mathieu Kassovitz as an organic hotelier. The lead characters’ names, incidentally, are a tribute to Louise Michel, a nineteenth-century French anarchist, though she could have barely envisaged the kind of anarchism proposed here.