Coup De Torchon [DVD]

French West Africa 1938.Local police chief Lucien Cordier(Philippe Noiret) is a lazy good natured slob who allows various characters like two local pimps, his wife(Stephane Audran)among others to treat him like dirt until he decides that enough is enough and that he is due some respect even if he doesn't quite believe it himself.The only ray of sunshine in his life is an affair he is having with a local married woman Rose(Isabelle Huppert).
Jet black adaptation of Jim Thompson's novel Pop 1280 is nicely relocated to colonial West Africa and the poverty of the indigenous black population and the rampant rascism exhibited by a majority of the French population is vividly conveyed.
Noiret is simply superb as Cordier balancing his character's roguish charm and natural insousiance with a buried sense of cunning that just needs a firm push to rear it's ugly head.Audran and Huppert are fine as always in support and Tavernier judges the moments of slapstick amongst the carnage with a very deft touch.
Coup De Torchon is just one of Bertrand Tavernier's many fine films in an excellent career and it may well be his best.However Philippe Sarde's score especially at the start seems a trifle overdone and out of synch with the tone of the film.
The widescreen print is very clean and is one of Optimum's better efforts.

I saw this film once in the eighties, so I was a little apprehensive on finally tracking down the DVD twenty years later. Was it as good as I remembered it?

YES! It is a simply wonderful film, Philippe Noiret is fantastic as the long suffering and unwanted policeman in a remote African village, who turns into a Machiavellian killer. You never stop liking him, but you feel the moral quandaries he faces. My wife has a far lower tolerance for art-house films than me, and she enjoyed it too.

One of my all time favourite films, a complete one off, see it for yourself.

At the moment Tavernier movies are at a premium, but in Cinema Heaven and probably in a couple of years when the passion for box sets catches up with him, we'll be able to see this cinema master for what he is worth, which is a lot.

It has to be said that "Coup de Torchon" is not Tavernier at his best - nowhere near as good as "Life and Nothing But" Life and Nothing But [DVD] [1989] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC], Daddy Nostalgie Daddy Nostalgia [DVD] [1990] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC], or A Sunday in the Country, his homage to Jean Renoir A Sunday in the Country ( Un dimanche à la campagne ) [ English subtitles ] [DVD]. But it shows why Tavernier is always worth watching, not least because he is a student and lover of literature and cinema, and the cinema he loves is about doubt, ambiguity and harsh truths.

The plot is simply summed up. The worm turns. The local cop, Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) is married to a cold wife (Stephane Audran) and lives in a menage a trois with his brother-in-law, Nono, who is knocking his sister off (if indeed she is his sister). With me so far? We are in French West Africa, what is now called Mauritania, on the Atlantic coast on the edge of the Sahara. The locals are Black muslims. It is 1938, the fag end of colonialism. Among the whites there is Rose (Isabelle Huppert), victim of a sadist husband, that Lucien is crazy about. There are pimps, and superiors, and representatives of local companies, and all of them piss on lazy, tolerant, cowardly Lucien. Until the worm turns. Taking a cue from his superior officer, he works his revenge on everyone in the town who has done him down in the first place.

You start by rooting for him. You expecially like his way of making the punishment fit the crime. But it - as the saying goes - gets out of hand as he starts to make others do his dirty work for him. He is not a monster, but he is caught in the monstrosities of colonialism and racism, and he drags others down with him, including the audience.

I won't give away the plot any more, except to say that the movie stops rather than ends, which is its main weakness. I also have to admit that it never quite finds the form to express what it wants to say, with the result that at 125 minutes it feels more like 150. But where it is absolutely brilliant is on racism; I don't think I've ever seen a film which so brutally expresses the view that black people are sub-human, or encapsulates the response where we go along with vile views for the sake of an easy life, protesting mildly, liberally and ineffectually. It's a very uncomfortable experience. American cinema would show white villains beating black victims, but it would not allow them to argue why negroes didn't have souls, and it would not allow the hero to do anything but shoot them.

There is one scene, a long scene, which is the core of Tavernier's vision. The body of one of the people killed turns up and is brought back on a cart by a black boy to Lucien's house. The black boy knows too much and has to die, but before he dies, there is a long and profound dialogue, severe and revolutionary. "Why are you killing me?" asks the boy. "I always liked you. I trusted you." "That's where you made your mistake. You trusted a white man. You compromised yourself, you became one of them," replies Lucien. White men, the source of corruption, the original sin which infects everyone, so that any kind of trust is a fatal mistake. None of us deserves to live, we are all complicit.

This is film noir on a global scale, but filmed in the kind of washed-out colour which goes with infection and siroccos.

Many directors have one actor who embodies their ideal protagonist. Not necessarily an alter ego, but a typical character. De Nero and Scorsese, Depp and Tim Burton, Cary Grant and Hitchcock. Tavernier's is Philippe Noiret. A soft face, open to luxury and temptation, but fundamentally decent, a complacent face, but one with hard eyes, so you don't quite know where it will go when the complacency is shaken. Noiret here has to go a helluva distance. Maybe too far, because the ending doesn't convince.

But anyone who loves Graham Greene will like this movie.