Le Paltoquet (1986) - film review

Each evening, four men – a doctor, a journalist, a professor and a merchant – meet up in a deserted bar to play cards.  As they play, the bar’s owner, her downtrodden barman (nicknamed “le paltoquet”) and a strange woman in white watch from a distance.  One night, the card game is disturbed when a police inspector suddenly appears and declares that a dead body has been found nearby.  Certain that one of the four men is the murderer, the inspector starts his investigation.  All the evidence suggests that the doctor did the deed, but we soon learn that nothing is quite what it seems…

With tongue firmly in cheek and an evident gush of creative flair, Michel Deville happily deconstructs the comedy thriller in this visually striking minimalist film – one of his most baffling works.  With big name actors and ludicrously sparse sets, the film simultaneously mocks Hollywood’s obsession with stars whilst proving that good actors are apparently all you really need to make a good film.  In keeping with much of Deville’s work, Le Paltoquet is both subversive and self-mocking, whimsical yet slightly disturbing.  There is no comfort factor in Deville’s cinema; we never know quite what to expect.  And this is what makes his films both uncomfortable and strangely rewarding.

Le Paltoquet is plausibly Deville’s most artificial and stylised film.  Nothing in the film is real.  The plot is a low-grade English-style whodunit, lacking both the logic and imagination of the average Agatha Christie novel.  The characters are either bland stereotypes or enigmatic waifs, strip-cartoon creations about which we either know everything or nothing.  The set is an empty bar-café, its emptiness emphasised by its improbable size and lack of furniture.  On paper, the film looks as if it couldn’t possibly work.  Yet it does – as improbably as a brick suspended in mid-air, in gleeful defiance of the law of gravity.  The way the film’s elements are conceived, choreographed and assembled transforms a third rate apology for a film concept into a compelling piece of cinematic art.

The whole thing is unreal – and legitimately so, as Deville cheekily reveals in the film’s final minute.  The empty set and the equally empty characterisation give the film a haunting, existentialist feel, implying that we are seeing cannot be reality, but some bizarre fantasy.  The quirky style, sharp dialogue and eccentric performances from an excellent cast also give the film great entertainment value.  From Jeanne Moreau to Claude Piéplu, each actor appears to have been chosen with precision and delivers a performance which fits perfectly within the ensemble.  Jean Yanne’s blustering inspector is a welcome contrast to the infallible Hecule Poirot, and who can fail to be mesmerised by Fanny Ardant’s striptease?

Witty, inventive and intriguing, Le Paltoquet is rivened with darker undercurrents which suggest, as in most of Deville’s films, that there is far more to the film than first meets the eye.  Could the “paltoquet” of the film’s title (translated as “pompous fool”) symbolise our conscious self?   Are we merely passive observers or the architects of all that we see?   Le Paltoquet may not give away many answers but it does prompt us to ask some pretty profound questions about the nature of existence.

© James Travers 2004

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