Jean-Luc Godard
1963
102 minutes
This is a Godard film starring Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, and believe it or not Jack Palance. It is one of those French New Wave films where you're going to spend a lot of time looking at the architecture, and the house Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli share is an absolutely gorgeous space in which to stalk around arguing with your spouse.
You mostly know Jack Palance from Shane, which is not one of your favorite films. However, you absolutely do love him as the bad guy in it. He is delightfully menacing, and his moments on screen in that film were helpful to you in occasionally being a bad guy in real life. His character goads and taunts some idiot into drawing his gun as an excuse to shoot him. You weren't quite as much of a sociopath about this as your co-workers, but this strategy proved useful several times when dealing with unpleasant or difficult customers when you drove a taxi in particular. Your shadier co-workers would regularly pick fights with customers they didn't want to take out to the outskirts just as an excuse to ditch them on the street and pick up more lucrative calls. You rarely did this for such mercenary reasons, but for some terrible customers you would deliberately subtly escalate conflicts until they crossed some line (like swearing at you) so you would have an excuse to eject them. This was a perfectly blunt way of dealing with rude idiots whose bluster you didn't feel like tolerating on a stressful night, and it was a good way of blowing off steam.
Your more psychotic friends would sometimes goad fares into an actual fistfight just as an excuse to get into a scrap, which always seemed a bit counterproductive to you. There was enough conflict on the job where such opportunities arose naturally without inviting more.
You're usually a peacemaker and a de-escalator. And grey-rocking difficult people is usually your go-to option for dealing with idiots of all sort. But being able to goad someone into overreacting is a wonderfully essential tool to have in your toolbox when presented with assholes and bullies. This strategy serves you to this day, and you have Jack Palance to thank for it.
Time to choose something different: