Product Description

An inspired rendering of Jim Thompson's pulp novel Pop. 1280, Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de torchon (Clean Slate) deftly transplants the story of an inept police chief- turned-heartless killer and his scrappy mistress from the American South to French West Africa. Featuring pitch-perfect performances by Philippe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert, this striking neo-noir straddles the line between violence and lyricism with dark humor and visual elegance, perfectly captured by Criterion's glorious new anamorphic transfer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56985 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2001-03-13
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 128 minutes

Amazon.com
Bertrand Tavernier tranforms Jim Thompson's pulp novel Pop. 1280 into an engrossing and unsettling meditation on moral collapse. Arguably his best thriller, the French director transposes the story from the American South of the 1910s to colonial West Africa of the 1930s, where the very first black slaves entered the New World. Philippe Noiret plays a bumbling police chief who's the butt of ridicule in the corrupt town, with an abusive wife (Isabelle Huppert) who cheats on him and laughs in his face. But Noiret reaches a point of quiet madness, slowly getting his revenge by going on a killing spree. The subdued actor is at his best here, adopting a goofy attitude that works to his benefit when no one suspects him of the diabolical murders. A great subversive film enhanced by Philippe Sarde's jazzy score and wild camera movements intended to be out of sync with the action. --Bill Desowitz

Customer Reviews

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.

TERMINATORIX
When they are on location, film directors usually tend to forget the actors in order to become for a while only still photographers. If James Bond is in Paris, one can be sure to enjoy a free guided tour of the city including the Eiffel Tower, Les Champs-Elysées and l'Arc de Triomphe. So, when one reads that the story of french director Bertrand Tavernier's COUP DE TORCHON is happening in the French West Africa of 1938, wild images begin to fly through the movie lover's anxious mind : elephants, lions, snakes, Tarzan, glorious sunsets and other african clichés suddenly make their appearance in front of his very eyes.

But amateurs of touristic trips will be very disappointed with Tavernier's use of african landscapes. The director is even playing with us in the scene involving the french rock singer Eddy NONO Mitchell standing on his bed because something is moving under his bed. We are all waiting for a snake, a scorpion or a colourful spider to burst out while the dangerous animal is finally described as a vulgar night butterfly that the director doesn't even judge necessary to show to the audience. Bertrand Tavernier is not following the usual codes of the genre and is saying it.

In fact, Bertrand Tavernier doesn't follow any codes in COUP DE TORCHON. The main character, Philippe LUCIEN CORDIER Noiret, is presented as a weak corrupted policeman despised by the local bad boys. Once he has earned a bit of our sympathy, he turns into a machiavelic no-law madman driven by revenge. The last scene of COUP DE TORCHON deserves to stay in movie history : Philippe Noiret, by the sole power of his eyes and gestures, makes us understand that he has become completely mad.

So why Africa ? For its strange atmosphere, for its heat, for its colours. Bertrand Tavernier explains it very clearly during the interview you will find as extra-feature with this Criterion release. An alternate ending, not very convincing, is also presented as well as the american trailer of this 1981 movie which, in my opinion, is a masterpiece.

A DVD for your library.

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.