Coup de Torchon - Criterion Collection (1981)

Sun-drenched film noir . . .

For my money, this is one of French director Bertrand Tavernier's best and most imaginative films, based on a Jim Thompson novel and filmed entirely in Senegal - transported there from the American South. A 2-hour film, shot in muted colors and to a great extent with a Steadicam, it has a look and feel that studiously avoids the exotic and any of the cliches and stereotypes that Western audiences might have about Africa. While technically a film noir in its subject matter and its focus on crime and the criminal mind, it also avoids the cinematic conventions of that genre, with its sun-drenched images and its mix of dark psychological drama and cold-blooded violence with comedy and farce. A story without a moral center, it refuses to find a neat way out of the conflicts it creates, and neither love nor the judicious use of firearms is able to bring the ambiguity at the heart of the film into resolution.

The performances in the film are striking, especially veteran Phillipe Noiret as the small town policeman who finds that he's free to disavow a code of morality that might have restrained him were he not representing the law far from France in a colonial town in the 1930s. Set morally adrift, he finds himself capable of justifying any misbehavior, whether cheating on his wife or murdering a faithful retainer. Like Tavernier's other excursions into character, time and place, this film poses a number of intriguing questions that it leaves partly unanswered. The final image of Noiret, about to commit an unspeakable act and then discovering a sudden lack of resolve, represents well the final enigma of his character. The DVD includes a long and very informative interview with Tavernier. August 9, 2007

Failed product from France

This is a typical strange film from French director Bertrand Tavernier, with Isabelle Huppert as female star. It happens in French West Africa. You have the black natives and the white French, as the 2 opposite races that play a big part in the story. You have also the bad guys, vicious, racist, stupid, against the main character, to whom everything is related.

There is a transformation in this character along the film. And this transformation seems to be the "story" of the film. What this transformation means, how it comes to happen, what is going on exactly, I don't know. You may take a guess if you see this film. But as for me, I didn't care, because even a boring and uninteresting film I can take it, but not when it is narrated in this unoriginal and coarse way.

I have to say that I like most of the French cinema, so apparently boring and lack-of-action films don't mean bad to me. But this one is just not nice to look at. I couldn't figure out what the whole thing was about (and if it was about what I just said, then it's not worth it). I can't get to like any of the characters. I film with no hero, not even somebody to like!

The only thing I liked was the outdoors scenery, and the photography was nice.

This director is no good.
May 17, 2006

The law of the jungle!

A bureaucrat,a man good for nothing is a credited police in Bourkassa, Western Africa, 1936. The corruption in its several faces rides on him, laughs of him and mocks about him. His marriage is a mess; his wife is lover of her own brother a stupid pimp.

This is the dramatic stage chosen by Tavernier to make an ambitious film where the predator concept will surround the screen thanks to a perfect script. Three out of this world stars of cinema such as Noiret, Audran and Huppert are overwhelming.

A sublime masterpiece; a legitiamte pride for the French Cinema in the early eighties.

March 28, 2006

Black Comedy Noir

Coup de Torchon is an extremely well-made film. Noiret's acting as the lead is stellar. I haven't read the Jim Thompson novel on which the film is based (in fact it's one of the few Thompson novels I haven't read), so I honestly can't say how similar or dissimilar the film is from its source material. Standing on its own, however, Coup de Torchon is extremely effective and very unsettling.

The main character, brilliantly played by Noiret, is bullied by everyone around him. He is bumbling, passive, and foolish. Everyone takes advantage of him, makes a fool of him, and expects him to take it. He gets fed up and starts doing something about it. At first it seems he is merely going to exact revenge, sort of like the character in Romero's Bruiser. He then goes beyond this, becoming convinced that the world is so cruel and inhumane that to murder people is almost to do them a favor. He is crafty in his revenge, to be sure. It turns out that this bumbling, silly man is capable of diabolic, calculated, ingenious cruelty. He frames others around him, manipulates those in his environment, and turns foe against foe, all while still acting as though he's the same bumbling fool. No one would ever expect him. Why? Because he seems so dumb he almost has a childlike innocence about him. Noiret's character looks around him and sees nothing but silent and unsilent suffering. He thinks that the common belief that murder is the worst of crimes is a bald-faced falsity. People are regularly so cruel, so inhumane, and so monstrous to one another, that killing is by comparison a petty offense. Best line of the film: "If man was really made in God's image, then I wouldn't want to meet God in a dark alley."

All of the performances in Coup de Torchon are excellent, but Noiret and Isabelle Huppert, as his naïve lover, steal the show. We are left to speculate why Noiret's character snaps. This is not a flaw with the film, however. Why does anyone ever snap? Do we really ever know? No. What we do know is that Noiret's character is a time bomb that has gone off. He becomes, technically, a serial killer, but like the killer in The Minus Man, you'll find yourself oddly sympathyzing with him, even, and this is the morbid genious of the film, cheering him on! Noiret's character sees himself as a savior of sorts. He seems to have a Christ complex, but not of the usual type. He does not want to martyr himself. He says he is Christ returned, with a cross for every person, here to save the innocent. The catch is that he finds that no one is in fact innocent. Either by acts of commission or by crimes of omission, everyone is guilty. The out-and-out racism in the film is a device used by the director to illustrate this. The way that all of the white characters treat the black characters in this film is despicable and disgusting. Notice that even those who do not directly abuse the blacks nevertheless complacently allow it to happen all around them. When Noiret kills the black man it is because he sucked up to white men; he kissed their butts. He, in other words, allowed cruelty to blacks to occur by making it okay, by befriending the very people who were committing such societal crimes. Thus everyone is guilty by sheer virtue of their complicity. Even the blacks. The film opens with Noiret starting a fire to warm some cold African children. The film ends with him pointing his revolver at them. Perhaps he is going to put them out of their misery. Regardless, he is going to kill them. He has become convinced that the guilty must die and that all are guilty. One wonders if he'll turn the gun on himself, for he is just as guilty as anyone. As sheriff, when he saw a crime being committed in public, he would just let it occur. He too is guilty by complicity.
January 9, 2006

A magnificent, murderous black comedy with Philippe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert

Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) is the overweight, lazy, unshaven chief of police in Bourkassa, Senegal. It's 1938, and this French colony is a backwater of dust, flies and dysentery. Cordier can't talk his wife, Huguette (Stephane Audran), into sharing his bed, but she is very solicitous of her "brother" who lives with them. He takes bribes from two pimps who humiliate him in public. He's the butt of jokes among his superiors. He has hot eyes for Rose Marcaillou (Isabelle Huppert), who is a sexy young woman with a brute of a husband. Cordier willingly puts off doing almost anything, including making arrests. He's a man easy to get impatient with and easy to push around. "You never arrest anybody," the local priest tells him one day. "You've got to show folks you're brave, honest and hard working." "I can't," Cordier says. "Why not?" "Because I'm not brave, honest and hardworking." One night, after making the two pimps sing a bawdy song on the banks of the river, he shoots both of them and pushes their bodies into the current.

Coup de Torchon is a black comedy so dark you'll need to look carefully; so elegant you'll smile at Cordier's planning and improvisations; so clever you may consider a few murders of your own. The dialogue is sharp and amusing. The background score is an energetic mix of Thirties popular themes. The end of the movie is a sort of sour, bittersweet mixture that leaves an interesting taste in the mouth.

Cordier decides to get rid of Rose's husband, which he does with a shotgun blast. As the man lies dying, Cordier walks over and kicks him hard several times. "I know kicking a dead man isn't very nice," Cordier tells Marcaillou, kicking him again, "but first, I wanted to and second, there's no risk involved." Later, after enjoying the enthusiastic delights of Rose, she tells him, "Having you is an honor...a man who's killed my husband for love." "I was just getting rid of trash," Cordier replies. "The trash also happened to be your husband, so I killed two birds with one stone."

No one in the dusty backwater of Bourkassa would ever think Cordier guilty of being a murderer, much less a serial murderer. He manages to take care of a few more and gradually sees himself as a sort of cleanser of humanity. "I just help to reveal (people's) true nature. It's a dirty job, Rose," he tells his lover, "and you might very well say I deserve all the dirty pleasure I get out of it."

We leave Cordier by himself, still the police chief of Bourkassa, on the brink of WWII. He looks at people with sad eyes. "I'm a policeman...I'm Jesus Christ in person, sent here with a load of crosses bigger than the next. I try to save the innocent, but there aren't any."

Philippe Noiret, one of the world's great actors, is superb as Cordier. In his career he has played peasants and princes, fools and wise men. He has never been better here. Isabelle Huppert was 28 when she made this movie, and looks 18. She is willful, sly, funny and sexy. The Criterion DVD picture and audio are in great shape. Extras include an interview with Bertrand Tavernier as well as an alternate ending, truly strange, which was filmed but not used. January 6, 2006

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