With equal touches of Kafka, Genet, and Beckett, director Bertrand Tavernier's brilliant adaptation of Jim Thompson's pulp paperback Pop. 1280 takes place in an ethical no man's land. Thompson novels are all harrowing studies in amorality in which we must identify with someone whom circumstances force to do terrible things -- a point of view that found its perfect fruition in the darkness of American film noir.

Coup de Torchon is the story of a saintly madman in a world where the concepts of good and evil have no meaning. The book tells the tale of a corrupt sheriff in a small town in the American south of the 1910s. Tavernier's change to 1930s French West Africa makes perfect sense. Not only is American racism similarly ingrained in the African culture, the very first black slaves to come to the New World came from French West Africa, now Senegal, where the film was shot.

Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) is chief of police in Bourkassa. Despite his position of authority, nobody treats him with respect: not his wife, who openly cheats on him; not the town's citizens, who haven't failed to notice that he's never made an arrest; and certainly not the two pimps who use their monthly payoffs to Lucien as an excuse to humiliate him at every opportunity.

Noiret plays Cordier as a bumbling boob, a Gallic Woody Allen with no pride or values. He is an object of ridicule, and at first we laugh at him along with everyone else. Then he gets violent and diabolical, engaging in acts so against his nature that no one suspects a thing.

Once he starts on his murder spree, our sympathy works against us. As in Taxi Driver, Coup de Torchon lets you identify with a lunatic, then makes you shrink back in horror as you witness the results of his progressively ingenious rationalizations for murder. There has never been more casual gunplay; Cordier takes lives with a startling lack of drama.

Though the film is thematically similar to film noir, with its steadfast examination of the dark side of man, musically and visually it's the exact opposite. Tavernier's frequent collaborator, Philippe Sarde, has written an evocative, jazzy, cockeyed score, and cinematographer Pierre William Glenn has shot a bright and airy landscape, burnt raw by the relentless African sun.

The frequent use of steadicam creates a feeling of eavesdropping, as though we have wandered into a series of inevitable events. Everything is relaxed and natural -- so completely realistic that the most improbable conduct seems totally believable. The film goes mad as Lucien Cordier goes mad, and you end up alternately condoning and condemning his behavior.

According to Tavernier, the cinematography is deliberately unworldly. "I'm more and more attracted to camera movements that are not functional and that have no strategic or explanatory purpose," he explains. "I want them to be not parallel to the action, but either ahead or behind it. They should always aim to integrate a character with the decor, not just to follow the hero. I like a camera that lingers, explores, discovers. All the French films of the time were composed around the principle of symmetry, with the hero in the center. With the steadicam, I created an image that had no center, that kept shifting. It's different from a hand-held camera, reportage-style: We don't give the impression of cinéma verité. Instead, it has an imperceptible, disquieting effect. It's the physical equivalent of earth that isn't solid."

From almost any point of view, Coup de Torchon is a foreign film, so unique in every aspect that there's no way to be prepared for it. It's a mordantly funny script, full of odd touches (like a blind man who says "out of my sight" to a bunch of black kids), but eventually you swallow every laugh‹appropriate for a film about the disintegration of values. Even the credits contain what could be either a mistake or joke: At the opening, we are informed correctly that the film is based upon Pop. 1280; during the final credits, we are incorrectly informed that it's based on Pop. 1275. Is this a typo, or a veiled reference to the fact that five white people are killed in the course of the film?

At the start, Lucien sees some black children playing and builds them a fire when the sun is blotted out by an eclipse. But at the end, he watches the same scene and considers shooting them. It's an oblique attack on the morality of power that reaches no firm conclusions. Luckily, the cryptic qualities are not an obstacle to enjoyment, but only add to the mystery.

According to David Ansen in Newsweek, "Ambiguity is Tavernier's subject and his style: You may scratch your head at times, wondering . . . exactly what the point of this dark fable is, but you will just as likely be seduced by its macabre humor."

It might seem impossible to make a humorous movie that seriously embraces nihilism. But in hands of a master like Tavernier's, even ambiguity can be entertaining.
-- Michael Dare

Michael Dare is an editor (A Day in the Life of Hollywood), a writer for Daily Variety, and a contributor to the book Movie Talk from the Front Lines.

Cast
Lucien Cordier: Philippe Noiret
Rose: Isabelle Huppert
Le Peron: Jean-Pierre Marielle
Huguette Cordier: Stephane Audran
Nono: Eddy Mitchell
Chavasson: Guy Marchand
Anne: Irene Skobline

Credits
Produced by: Adolphe Viezzi and Henri Lassa
Directed by: Bertrand Tavernier
Written by: Bertrand Tavernier and Jean Aurenche
Based on the novel Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson
Director of photography: Pierre-William Glenn
Edited by: Armand Psenny
Music by: Philippe Sarde

About the transfer Coup de Torchon is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1. This new digital transfer was created from the 35mm Intermediate Positive made from the original negative and the original 35mm magnetic audio track.

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