Les anges gardiens (1996)

Yvon Radmillo, nicknamed “The Pincer,” is a Frenchman living in Hong Kong who has stolen money from the Triads, the local mafia. Pursued by the gangsters, he tries to flee the country with his son Bao. But the mafia catches up with him and manages to wound him gravely. As he lies dying, he decides to ask for help from his former friend Antoine Carco (formerly known as Antoine Mérignac), who has become the owner of a cabaret in Paris. They used to be partners in various illicit dealings in Asia. He phones Antoine, at first pretending that he has terminal cancer, and asks him to come and collect his son, who is still in Hong Kong, and take him back to his mother, who is of Chinese origin. At first hesitant, Carco refuses his friend’s request, affectionately calling him “darling.” At these words, Régina, Antoine’s fiancée, an Italian woman with an excessively jealous temperament, has overheard part of the conversation. She begins to grow suspicious and starts spying on him. Continuing the conversation in an effort to convince him, Yvon reveals that he has hidden a huge sum of money in a bank vault and offers Carco a certain percentage of the total in exchange for his help. So that his son will recognize him, Carco must introduce himself by the nickname “Captain Haddock.” Still keeping discreetly out of sight, Régina, who has no idea who the caller is, immediately suspects Antoine not only of having an affair with another woman but of having had a child with her. The next instant, a truck appears. Radmillo does not even have time to hang up before it crashes into the phone booth, with Yvon still trapped inside, then hits a wall, killing him instantly. As soon as he arrives in Hong Kong, Carco learns that his friend did not die of cancer but was being pursued by the local mafia. He then wants to back out, but is taken to little Bao anyway. He eventually gives him the key to the vault, using the nickname Yvon had told him to use. Shortly after finding Bao, Carco faces the mafia’s first armed attack, first on foot and then by boat. He and little Bao narrowly manage to escape. During their flight, they happen upon a boarding school run by Mother Angelina, a French Catholic nun. There Carco meets Hervé Tarain, a French Catholic priest who has come to Hong Kong with a group of young people from modest backgrounds on an educational trip to help some missionary sisters. Tarain is about to return to Paris with the young people, as well as some of the mission’s enormous archives, stored in several trunks that Mother Angelina has so kindly foisted on him. Claiming his name is Monsieur Ciccolini and that he is a businessman in Asia to negotiate a major contract concerning the Beijing subway, he introduces Bao as his son, whom he must take back to his mother in Paris. Pretending that his business negotiations are not yet over and that he cannot return to France immediately, he manages—after making the poor priest feel guilty to force his hand—to persuade him to take little Bao to Paris and return him to his mother. Since Carco does not yet know where Bao’s real mother is, he convinces Father Tarain and Mother Angelina by calling Carco’s cabaret in Paris and asking to speak to Luna, an employee there who is also of Chinese origin, to tell her to pick up her son at the airport the following day. Unfortunately, Luna does not understand the situation, and Carco has to hang up in a hurry “because the call is getting expensive,” as Mother Angelina puts it. As soon as he has entrusted Bao to them, Carco hurries to the bank to withdraw the money Radmillo told him about, in the form of international banknotes. As he is leaving, a bank employee calls out to him and hands him a wallet “with the bank’s compliments.” On his way out, Carco suspects he is being followed. At the same time, the clerk leaves the bank to tell Mr. Mo’s henchmen to follow Carco. The next moment, Carco goes to a café to call Luna again and explain the situation more clearly. Shortly after he sets off again, members of the Triads immediately give chase. Carco takes down one or two of them, then steals a tuk-tuk from a poor shopkeeper. The Triads pursue him in two cars all the way to the airport. Meanwhile, Father Tarain has just arrived there with the children and tons of trunks and suitcases. Racing at full speed on his tuk-tuk, Carco first narrowly misses the unfortunate priest, then barely avoids being crushed by the two pursuing cars, to the amusement of the young people accompanying him. Unfortunately, during the chase Carco eventually crashes his tuk-tuk into a building, which collapses moments later, and finishes the rest of the journey clinging to the back of a bus. In the end, Carco manages to stay with Tarain and the children, pretending he is waiting for his business flight. In reality, he is trying to escape the mafia, which has followed him into the airport. Before boarding, Carco hides the money in the priest’s diary, whose cover bears an image of Saint Catherine of Siena, and slips it back into his briefcase without his knowledge so that it will get through security. While Father Tarain takes an inordinate amount of time checking in his many trunks, the gang members try to stop Carco from leaving by anonymously reporting him to customs. They accuse him of stealing a wallet from an employee of the Bank of Shanghai, even though the employee had given it to him earlier. British customs officers stop Carco and subject him to a full search, which naturally turns up nothing. Once this tiresome formality is over, Carco tries at the last moment to join the plane Tarain and the young people are boarding, even sweet-talking the check-in clerk by claiming his wife is about to give birth in Paris any minute. On board, Carco tells Father Tarain that he will, after all, be able to return to Paris, claiming that his business negotiations with the Chinese ended prematurely because German competitors won the contract. Since Carco has booked a first-class seat, as well as another one so he can stay with the priest and the diary containing the money, he persuades him by pretending to be afraid of flying. The priest eventually accepts his invitation. During dinner, pretending to be very religious, Carco starts a conversation with Tarain about the Catholic Church’s position on various social issues. A little later, taking advantage of Tarain’s brief absence in the restroom, Carco tries to rummage through the priest’s briefcase but breaks the lock. When Tarain returns, he decides to keep the case at his feet. Later that night, he catches his foot on the briefcase, which falls into the aisle. Carco takes the opportunity to search through his things again and is dismayed to find that the diary is no longer there; this ends up waking Father Tarain. When Tarain asks what he is doing, Carco tells him he was looking for Bao’s passport. Back at his seat, Carco pretends he wants to make a donation to the priest’s parish and asks to meet with Father Tarain, hoping to get him to use his diary. The priest tells him he has “got rid of it.” At this, Carco loses his temper, thinking Tarain has thrown away the diary and its contents. A misunderstanding then develops between them about the diary and the holy image on its cover. Carco implies that it is an image of the Virgin Mary, while Father Tarain explains that it is Saint Catherine of Siena. Carco is finally reassured when the priest admits that the diary is in the aircraft’s hold, inside one of his suitcases, after all. The next day in Hong Kong, one of Mr. Mo’s henchmen forces the bank clerk to go to Mr. Mo. Since the clerk has failed his mission and Carco has managed to leave the country with the money, one of Mr. Mo’s men immediately strangles him. Mr. Mo then orders his men to go to Paris, recover the money at any cost, and kill Carco if necessary. On arriving at Roissy Airport, Carco first helps the priest retrieve all his trunks and suitcases. When Tarain shows him the suitcase containing the famous diary, Carco cannot help snatching it up in a hurry. Since he is carrying too many suitcases, a French customs officer calls out to him to inspect them. Father Tarain wants to intervene, but Carco quickly causes a scene to draw the customs officers’ attention to himself and let the diary and its contents pass through customs unnoticed. His ruse works, but he is once again pulled aside for yet another thorough search. Meanwhile, Luna arrives at the airport with Lucky, Antoine’s brother, to pick up little Bao, followed very closely by Régina, who has arrived by taxi in disguise. When Bao sees Luna, he knows perfectly well she is not his mother. In front of Bao and Father Tarain, Luna ashamedly admits that she is not his mother, despite Carco’s claims. When Carco finally returns, Tarain decides to confront him. Caught off guard, Carco comes up with another string of lies. But Régina, Carco’s actual fiancée, who has been hiding behind a magazine and has heard their exchange, suddenly cuts in and has a terrible fit of jealousy, convinced Antoine has had a child with Luna. Between Régina’s tantrums, Luna, Lucky’s moralizing, and Father Tarain’s complaints, Carco finally loses patience and rushes for the suitcase containing the millions to retrieve them, under the astonished gaze of the priest, who realizes he has been deceived. After another verbal argument between the two men, Carco, exasperated, leaves Bao with the priest while he tries to find the address of Lilly Wang, Bao’s real mother. Outraged by Carco’s many lies, Hervé Tarain warns him that his conscience will eventually torment him for his misdeeds. Antoine does not care and offers only an ironic “Hallelujah!” before leaving the airport. Carco’s greed and Tarain’s goodness earn them each a “guardian angel” (hence the film’s title), whose personalities are quite the opposite of their own. Carco gets the good angel, while Father Tarain is saddled with a truly lascivious and vulgar spirit. Each angel is the double of the person to whom it has been sent, and can be seen only by that person. When Carco discovers his angel sitting in the back seat of his car and lecturing him, he causes a serious pileup on the A1 motorway. Although entirely at fault, he still finds a way to verbally abuse one of the drivers involved. After being checked at the gendarmerie station, where a doctor attributes Carco’s “hallucinations” to jet lag, he speeds off to the church in Écouen where Father Tarain works, demanding an exorcism. To get it, he forcibly interrupts a parishioner’s confession by dragging her out of the confessional. This time, an exasperated Hervé Tarain refuses to give in to Carco’s demands and dismisses him without ceremony, along with the woman, whose “pathetic office squabbles” he no longer wants to hear. At that moment, Tarain’s rebellious angel appears with a loud, sardonic laugh, congratulating him on behavior that clearly does not meet an “elementary duty of Christian charity”: he has just refused absolution to someone who confessed. The angel quickly causes a series of disasters around the church for which Tarain seems responsible, as the angel, like Carco’s, is invisible to everyone else. Back at his cabaret, Carco is faced with yet another fit of jealousy from Régina, who attacks a Lautrec painting belonging to Antoine. She then tries to kill herself by jumping out of the window, but Carco catches her by the foot at the last moment, knocking off the red wig worn by the star performer. Just then, two Chinese gangsters burst into Carco’s office and point their guns at him, forcing him to raise his hands and let Régina fall into the cabaret’s dumpster just below the window. She screams with rage. One of the gangsters lets Carco know that Lilly Wang is Mr. Mo’s niece, the leader of the Triads. Carco manages to disarm his assailants. One escapes while the other is knocked to the floor. As Carco kicks him, his angel, horrified by such an outburst of violence, grabs his leg and stops him from continuing. The second gangster eventually gets back up and takes the opportunity to escape after hitting Carco. Having realized the terrible thing he did earlier and the punishment he is suffering, Father Tarain looks for Carco so he can make amends and arrives at his cabaret accompanied by his evil angel. Later, while Tarain waits for Carco in his office, a squad of the Chinese mafia once again storms the cabaret and causes a massacre. Unable to get the police to intervene immediately, Carco rushes into the main room, gun in hand, to drive off the gangsters. At the same time, one of the scantily dressed dancers rushes into the office and hides in a wardrobe with Father Tarain. The police finally arrive at the cabaret after the shootout. With urgent action needed, and not wanting to be held up by the police for too long, Carco decides to escape through the service door with Father Tarain, and they drive off. On the way to pick up Bao, Carco tells the priest about Bao’s mother’s connection to the Chinese mafia. At the same time, Antoine receives a phone call from an enraged Régina, who once again threatens to kill herself. Carco initially takes the threat lightly, but Father Tarain unconsciously convinces him otherwise. Antoine suddenly turns around and rushes back to his home. When Carco arrives, he finds his Jaguar in flames. Régina explains that the Chinese set fire to the car. Sensing danger, Carco prepares to flee and tries to explain the whole situation to Régina. Meanwhile, Father Tarain’s demonic angel has amused himself by starting a fire in the neighboring house. After the fire brigade arrives, Father Tarain offers to put Carco and Régina up temporarily at his family’s home, where Bao is already staying. The three of them argue again when Régina tells Tarain that Carco claimed Bao was the priest’s son, which angers him. The next day, the Triads go to Father Tarain’s home and kidnap Bao, as well as Jean-Luc Tarain, the priest’s brother. Mr. Mo phones Carco and forces him to return the money Radmillo stole in exchange for his two hostages, threatening to execute them immediately if Carco tries to contact the police. Tarain nevertheless wants to alert the authorities, which Carco is determined to prevent at all costs. Wanting to help them, the priest’s grandfather, a veteran of the Indochina War, offers to lend them his old rifle and help track down those “grapefruit faces.” As Tarain tries to reason with his grandfather, he argues with his angel, creating a misunderstanding. When Tarain comes downstairs again, pushing his grandfather in his wheelchair, his evil angel trips him, sending the old man’s wheelchair hurtling down the stairs. As it tumbles down, the rifle goes off accidentally and slightly wounds Carco in the calf. Some time later, Carco and Tarain go to Brussels to try to find Bao’s mother, who is undergoing drug rehabilitation at a private clinic. After they find the young Lilly, Carco, Tarain, and Lilly have lunch in a small Brussels restaurant. At first, Carco tries to spare the young woman and talks to her about trivial matters. Annoyed by Tarain pressing him to tell Lilly what is going on, he then bluntly tells her the truth, disregarding her doctor’s advice. When she learns that her husband, Yvon Radmillo, was actually crushed by a truck and that Bao has been kidnapped, all because of the Triads, the young Chinese woman promptly faints. After returning to Paris, they set out with reinforcements to find Mr. Mo’s hideout. According to one of Luna’s contacts, he goes to a restaurant called The Smoking Mandarin, located in the . Tired of waiting outside, Tarain decides to go into the restaurant. But one of Mr. Mo’s henchmen quickly catches him. With a gun pointed at him, Carco’s angel decides to intervene and knock the man out, much to Tarain’s angel’s displeasure. The two spirits then chase each other in indescribable chaos. Later, everyone goes to a large house where Bao and Jean-Luc are being held captive. The two are eventually rescued, and the gangsters are arrested. Later, Hervé Tarain marries Carco and Régina, as well as Lilly and her new husband, Bu Lin. Carco donates the millions to the collection, thereby making amends for the many sins of this adventure. This allows his angel to return to Heaven, while Tarain’s angel also disappears.