Un Ours dans le Jura

The Bear Did It

January 27, 2025By Nick HammondFilm
Franck Dubosc and Laure Calamy as the hapless couple at the heart of the intrigue in Un Ours dans le Jura (How to Make a Killing), directed by Dubosc.
Franck Dubosc and Laure Calamy as the hapless couple at the heart of the intrigue in Un Ours dans le Jura (How to Make a Killing), directed by Dubosc.

It sometimes helps to go to a film with low expectations – on the rare occasions when they are turned upside down, the sense of sheer pleasure and relief afterward feels all the better. That was the case with the unpromisingly titled Un Ours dans le Jura, literally translated as “a bear in the Jura” (a department in eastern France), and apparently to be released in the anglophone world as How to Make a Killing.

Anybody hoping to view a documentary on French wildlife will be disappointed – even though a bear launches the action of the film, indirectly causing the deaths of three unsavory characters, the animal remains peripheral to the story, other than in the repeated comment by various locals that there are no bears in the Jura.

Director of the film Franck Dubosc, who also stars in it and co-wrote the screenplay (with Sarah Kaminsky), has clearly been influenced by the dark comedy of The Coen brothers, particularly Fargo, but in no way is his film simply a pale imitation. The characters and situations that occur in a small village where everybody knows each other feel authentically French.

When Michel (played by Dubosc) swerves to avoid a bear on the road while driving in the Jura mountains and crashes into a stationary car, killing its two occupants, he and his wife Cathy (Laure Calamy, on glorious form) discover a stash of banknotes amounting to 2 million euros in the trunk of the car. Given the precarious state of their finances as they raise a 12-year-old son with learning difficulties (played by Timéo Mahaut), they decide to keep the money. When the local police chief Ronald (Benoît Poelvoorde) and his team begin to investigate the deaths, Michel and Cathy go to increasingly desperate and absurd lengths to cover their tracks.

Every scene is beautifully written and played, with the comic timing of all the actors judged to perfection. The highlight for me was the couple’s attempt to create an alibi retrospectively by asking for help from Paul’s old school friend Sabine (a cameo played with relish by Emmanuelle Devos), who owns a swingers’ club. When questioned by the police about what she and Michel had been doing on that evening, Cathy nervously replies that they were participating in a “bang bang,” hastily corrected by her husband to “gang bang.” That had me chuckling for days afterward.

Calamy, in particular, shows what a gifted actor she is, but the whole cast is excellent throughout, including Joséphine de Meaux as the police chief’s sidekick Florence, Mehdi Meskar as police officer Samy, and Kim Higelin in the role of Ronald’s free-spirited teenage daughter Blanche.

Avid bear-loving documentary-watchers apart, everybody should go see this delightfully invigorating movie.

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