How To Make A Killing

Even imperfection can possess its ideal state, its own form of perfection.
— Thomas de Quincey

In the white silence of the Jura, where the snow seems to cover even intentions, An Imperfect Crime unfolds like a parable about failure — not the heroic kind, but the everyday, domestic failure that belongs to the living matter of the ridiculous. Franck Dubosc directs a dark comedy that disguises itself as a rural tragedy and then, mockingly, reveals itself as farce. It is a game of mirrors, where the crime is born not from malice, but from clumsiness, from that moral fatigue that makes conscience stumble.

Michel and Cathy — a couple sunk in routine, the misery of bills and days — embody a desperate tenderness. When chance offers them the opportunity for crime and money, they react not as criminals, but as metaphysical amateurs: bungling, making mistakes, lying badly. The imperfection of their crime becomes the human measure of their disorientation. It is here that the film reveals its subtlest irony: evil never has a plan, only a series of well-intentioned errors.

Dubosc directs with a clear taste for paradox. The camera moves lightly, as if following the protagonists’ disjointed thoughts, alternating the rhythm of a thriller with the awkward pulse of comedy. The snowy landscape, so perfect and static, becomes a mental prison. Everything appears suspended, unreal, like in a dream where morality melts into the fog. The presence of migrants, petty traffickers, and peripheral figures who brush the story amplifies the sense of a distorted world, where margin and center coincide, and order is only an accident yet to happen.

But An Imperfect Crime is also, in a quieter yet no less incisive way, a social reflection on the unraveling of wellbeing and the emotional poverty that accompanies material poverty. Michel and Cathy and their son, wrapped in his own world, live economic precariousness that translates into emotional aridity: lack of money becomes lack of words, daily discomfort turns into marital silence. There are no great conflicts, only a slow emptying, a fatigue that consumes dialogue and renders irreversible what once was called love. The film, with its subtle humor, suggests that poverty is not only an economic condition, but a form of destiny that corrodes the very language of coexistence. And that the real catastrophe is not the accident, but the resignation to a life without the possibility of speech.

But the true engine of the film is irony — that typically French irony that neither consoles nor forgives, but illuminates the absurd. Laure Calamy and Dubosc are extraordinary in portraying the tragicomedy of a couple trying to survive their moral disaster. Every gesture, every poorly constructed lie, every silence too long becomes an exercise in bitter comedy, a small theorem on the impossibility of being consistent.

The laughter is born from pain but does not erase it: it transforms it into philosophical matter, into a thought that twists upon itself, as if the absurd were the only possible form of ethics. In this sense, An Imperfect Crime is a deeply existential film: it does not talk about the crime, but about the attempt to justify it to oneself, and therefore about the inevitable failure of every alibi.

In the finale, when apparent order seems to return and the snow covers everything, there remains a melancholic lightness — the kind only some films can leave: the smile of someone who has understood that life, after all, is always an imperfect crime.

There is a bit of madness in being human. Sometimes it’s all that keeps us alive.
— Charles Bukowski