A serial killer is loose in Paris, murdering a chief executive officer from a tobacco corporation, the director of a cosmetic company and other non-ethical business people. He then marks his victims with a Celtic symbol representing the sanctity of ecology, thus allowing police an insight into his motivations. The perpetrator is psychotic pharmacist Yan Lazarrec (Vincent Perez), who handpicks his victims for their crimes against the environment, before murdering them with a variety of ingenious methods including genetically modified ladybug assassins!
On his trail is police detective and hard line ecologist Francois Barrier (Guillaume Depardieu) who unwittingly befriends Yan after discovering his beloved is having an affair. Their subsequent amity is founded upon the emotional support Lazarrec offers as well as their shared ecological beliefs, although it swiftly becomes evident that Yan is also manipulating Francois to stay a step ahead of the police investigation. Simultaneously the relationship has a detrimental effect on the detective, as his witnesses are murdered and his leads dwindle through the information he unknowingly imparts to his quarry.
Francois’ continuous failures lead him to alcoholism, coupled with a loss of faith in his own ethics, which Yan struggles to reaffirm in a manner more akin to his own. Indeed, the interplay between the two central characters is one of the highlights of this gripping film, especially in the latter sequences as Francois realizes that his friend is the killer. Although the plot is not particularly original, the performances of Depardieu and Perez (with the latter akin to Jean Hugues Anglaide’s maniacal showing in Roger Avary’s ‘Killing Zoe’) plus the often-bizarre nature of some of the environments they encounter, make this movie a memorable experience.
‘Le Pharmacien De Garde’, the first full-length feature by director Jean Veber, is a film that combines black comedy, murder and an environmentalist theme in such a fashion that results in a very funny, challenging and engrossing thriller. It’s stylishly made, well acted and the dynamics of the relationship between Francois and Yan subtly suggests something more between them than friendship, which makes the end sequence feel as poignant as it is dramatic.
