J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster
 
Writer/director's Samuel Benchetrit's film, thanks to its multi-vignette format, has been compared structurally with Pulp Fiction (1994), but in fact, it is the 'slacker' mood of Kevin Smith's marvellous Clerks (1994) that informs the large part of the narrative.

A French motorway diner forms the backdrop to the four interconnecting stories - the first see Franck (Edouard Baer) botching a hold-up at the diner; the waitress Suzie (Anna Mouglalis), however, takes pity on him and shares her own hard-luck story. Part two sees two incompetent kidnappers Leon (Bouli Lanners) and Paul (Serge Lariviere) snatch a teenage girl from her rich family but, unfortunately for them, she is suicidal and her family don't want her back.

A dialogue between two ageing French rock stars (Alain Bashung and Arno playing themselves) who meet by chance at the diner forms the third segment, while the finale sees four ex-criminals smuggling their old partner out of hospital to visit their old hideout which has since been turned into hey! the diner in question, before the coda returns to the Franck and Suzie story.

Genuinely engaging in parts and beautiful in monochrome throughout, J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster  is a pleasant enough take on modest but failed aspirations and unlikely contentment. The performances fall, pleasantly, somewhere between knowing self-reference and genuine pathos, but the gimmick does feel a little forced at times.

First and fourth vignettes take the plaudits, while, stylistically, the film delights in using an entire range of cinematic devices, including a sped-up silent-film flashback culminating in an iris shot. The multiplicity approach works because Benchetrit, whose previous work was Janis et John (2003), successfully creates a different mood for each segment, even if the quality of the individual stories varies. Still, it's a diner well worth popping into.

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