Bob Biswas and the company he keeps: What movies say about assassins

Unlike Jef, Joubert does not mind explaining his life: “Well, the fact is, what I do is not a bad occupation. Someone is always willing to pay [...] no need to believe in either side or any side. There is no cause. There's only yourself.” About his purported claims of having no moral concern about his work, he says, “I don't interest myself in why. I think more often in terms of when, sometimes where, always how much.”Jef has inspired assassins back home as well. In the Hindi film Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), Yadav ji (Harish Khanna) is a cow-belt Jef Costello/Joubert in kurta-pajama. In the 2018 Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal, an unassuming old man Thatha Maistry (Karate Venkatesan) comes up with an ingenious way to dispose of his victims in a village.But Maistry, unlike Jef or Joubert, does not rely on personal code alone to do his work. He is a higher-caste assassin exclusively hired by higher-caste peoples to do their bidding, which he sees as his divine purpose. Although his line of thinking might be distasteful, he is no different from the mob assassin (Forest Whitaker), who swears by the 17th century samurai manual Hagakure in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999).The trope of the ultra-professional and monastic assassin is parodied in Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki’s bizarre thriller Branded to Kill (1967). The number one assassin bullies and patronises the number three assassin by discussing his weird lifestyle that has helped him maintain his ranking: sleep with eyes open, piss in pants, lest you miss your target.Are the best assassins then philosophers first? Like Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who thinks death at his hands is merely a matter of chance and has no more meaning to it, in No Country for Old Men (2007).Sometimes, it is not your chosen ideas that help pick your job, but your inherent temperament. “One's profession is very often determined by one's personality,” the killer Wong (Leon Lai) observes in Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels (1995), adding that being lazy and preferring people to arrange things for him suits him as his work just includes showing up at the designated spot with a gun.And watching too many of these movies can, in turn, create a composite assassin. Ambitious hitman Lok (Andy Lau) is a cinephile who references Le Samourai, Crying Freeman, and El Mariachi (1992), while waxing poetic on the connections between cinema and his trade in Johnnie To’s Fulltime Killer (2001): “I love movie trailers. They represent the best a movie has to offer. Just like when you die, your life flashes before your eyes.