COUP DE TORCHON
AKA
Clean Slate
1981 - French
Liner notes for the Criterion Laserdisc
by Michael Dare
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-mans-land. Jim 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
it's perfect fruition in the dark 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 of a small
town in the American south of the 1910's. Tavernier's change to French
South Africa of the '30s makes perfect sense. Not only is American racism
similarly ingrained in the African culture, but the very first black slaves
to come to the New World were from French South Africa, now Senegal, where
the film was shot on location.
Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret)
is chief of Police in Bourkassa. Despite his position of authority, nobody
treats him with respect. Not his wife, who is openly cheating on him, not
the citizens of the town, who haven't failed to notice that he has never
made an arrest, and certainly not the two town 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 it's 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, cock-eyed
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 whole 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 cinema verite. 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. It is so unique in every aspect that
there's no way to be prepared for it. Tavernier juggles a fascinating combination
of elements and somehow creates art.
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 the film eventually makes you swallow every laugh -
appropriate for a film about the disintegration of values.
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 if you've grasped exactly what the point
of this dark fable is, but you will just as likely be seduced by it's macabre
humor."
It might seem impossible to
make an entertaining a humorous movie that seriously embraces nihilism,
where nothing means anything, but in a master like Tavernier's hands, even
ambiguity can be fun entertaining.
MISTAKE OR JOKE? YOU FIGURE IT OUT!
In the opening credits, we are informed correctly that the film is based upon Jim Thompson's novel "Pop. 1280." During the final credits, we are incorrectly informed that the film is based upon Jim Thompson's novel "Pop. 1275." Is is a typographical error, or a veiled reference to the fact that five white people have been killed in the course of the film?
"Sure I am," I said. "I sure ain't going to do nothing else but."
"Good, I'm relieved to hear it."
"Yes sir," I said. "I'm really going to start cracking down. Anyone that breaks a law from now on is goin' to have to deal with me. Providing, o'course, that he's either colored or some poor white trash that can't pay his poll tax."
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