Buffet froid (1979)
Directed by Bertrand Blier

Film Review

The immense popularity of Les Valseuses (1974) and Préparez vos mouchoirs (1978) established Bertrand Blier as one of the most commercially successful auteur filmmakers of his generation, gleefully shocking bourgeois sensibilities with his boldly iconoclastic brand of cinema.  Then he made Buffet froid, a film which, at the time of its release, was shunned, misunderstood and appreciated only by those critics who were favourably disposed towards his work.  This quintessential Blier offering, now considered by some to be his finest work, barely attracted an audience of 0.8 million when it was first screened in France, and it took many years before it acquired the cult status it now enjoys.

Today it is remarkably easy to accept Buffet froid as one of the defining works of 1970s French cinema, a film that succinctly encapsulates the pessimism and anxieties of this mercurial decade that stands as a monstrously warped reaction to the irrational hyped-up optimism of the 1960s.  Of all Bertrand Blier's film, this is the one that, arguably, has the greatest relevance today.  Indeed, it seems to be frighteningly prescient of the post-truth me-me-me world we now inhabit, a place where rationality and meaning - the bedrock of our supposedly civilised society - are becoming devalued and derided to the point that no one seems to care if they disappear altogether.

All that counts in this brave new world is the individual and his ill-formed opinions based on naive prejudices and self-regarding conceit.  Society, social obligations, indeed any notion of a common humanity and shared destiny - none of these ideas matter any more.  What Blier presents in his most disturbing and most anarchic film is a nightmare vision devoid of logic and human feeling - a vision that we now recognise as the reality we are all too blithely creating for ourselves, under the guiding hand of some very nasty influences.

Buffet froid is an absurdist fantasy that effectively combines the idiosyncratic tropes of Ionesco, Kafka, Beckett and Pinter with the darkly humorous surrealism of Luis Buñuel.  From this chaotic melange we are presented with a dreamlike narrative revolving around an unemployed loser (Gérard Depardieu in the third of his eight collaborations with Blier) who is confronted with the sheer meaningless of his existence when he falls in with his wife's killer (Jean Carmet) and a seemingly unhinged police inspector (Bernard Blier, the director's illustrious father).  None of these characters behaves as we might expect, and if anything their reactions to events is the exact opposite to what we might consider normal.

What makes the characters believable, in spite of their seemingly ludicrous behaviour, is the coldly dehumanised urban environment in which they are placed.  From the crushing desolation of an underground station at the start of the film to the pristine and equally soulless apartment block that is home to Depardieu and Blier senior, we are confronted with a world that has no comfort or deeper meaning than the purely functional.  The human beings inhabiting this concrete and metal fabricated reality are mere reflections of the world in which they live.  Lacking empathy and reason, they are no more than a collection of conscious impulses that fail to attain any measure of coherence.  Lacking the facility to be surprised, man has become homo absurdus, a creature than can no longer make sense of anything, and doesn't even try.

The fact that Depardieu's character is named Tram (presumably after the German word for dream, Traum) would imply that what we are witnessing is a series of nightmares that are the product of his subconscious angst, his yearning for meaning in a seemingly meaningless cosmos.  Periodically, the narrative shifts abruptly, as happens in a dream, the starkest occurrence of this being the dramatic transition near the end of the film from an eternally nocturnal urban setting to an equally artificial rural locale, complete with manmade lake.  Tram is the only character that we are allowed to engage with, the only one we recognise as even vaguely human.  The others all strike us as distinctly inhuman, in both their actions and their words, and yet they represent aspects of humanity that are all too familiar to us.

Carmet's unnamed serial killer is the most pathetic of Tram's acquaintances - a man who kills women without compunction and then is driven to seek out his victim's partners so that he can unburden his soul's torment.  This most appalling species of attention seeker, a creature of the night who is pathologically afraid of the dark and even his own shadow, turns out to be nothing more than a crazed infant desperately seeking approval.  He is trapped in a perpetual self-centred pre-adolescence, unable to grow up and come to terms with the fact that he lives in a world where there are other people of equal value to himself.  How easily do we recognise the same traits in so many of today's political leaders - deluded infants selected by an even more deluded mob.

In Blier senior's jaded police inspector we have the casually cynical counterpoint to Carmet's inoffensive homicidal maniac.  Here is a man who consciously rejects conventional morality, just so that he can be more effective as a law-enforcer.  If he has to cheat, betray and kill to make the world a better, safer place, so be it.  There is no place for beauty, honour or compassion in his soul.  His loathing for classical music led him to butcher his own wife, and his acute moral blindness prevents him from seeing what is right.  To his way of thinking, the ends always justify the means.  It is far better that dangerous killers should remain at large, for if they are put in prison there is a real risk that they may contaminate the innocent.

And so what Blier and Carmet's characters - the heartless cop and the cowardly killer - represent are the same types that were immortalised by L. Frank Baum in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as the tin man and lion. Depardieu may not look much like Judy Garland, but, as the lost soul haunted by dreams and an ever-present existential angst, he is a dead-ringer for the compulsively home-seeking Dorothy.  The absence of the scarecrow from Blier's fantastic narrative is significant, his being a world where the brain is not something anyone would ever miss, presumably because no one is aware of its existence.  A brain implies a capacity for rational and logical thought, and as we have already observed such a capacity does not exist in the world of Alphonse Tram.  The brain is entirely redundant, so why bother looking for it?

In one of the film's weirder excursion into black comedy, Depardieu is impelled to take as his lover the widow (Geneviève Page) of a man who coerced him into killing him.  This typically Blieresque take on the classic femme fatale (reminiscent of Jeanne Moreau's character in Les Valseuses) proves to be another wish fulfilment fantasy to which Depardieu appears prone and is not long afterwards supplanted by another, a cool silent temptress in the form of Carole Bouquet sensually rowing across a placid lake that heaves with dark Freudian connotations.

It is in this final encounter, enchanted by the soulless beauty Nemesis, that Depardieu comes to realise the abject futility of his existence.  Unable to take responsibility for his own actions (a murder that he cannot even recall committing, another murder he is too willing to forget), he becomes lost in a labyrinth of absurdity that leads inevitably to a death that is as glib and pointless as his life.  Incapable of making any sense of all that has happened to him, Tram has no choice but to submit, and as he tumbles into the yawning abyss a single question still burns in his mind: Why...?  The fact that its central protagonist is sufficiently aware of his predicament to see the tragedy of his existence is the only consolation that Buffet froid offers us.  No one heeded Blier's warning back in 1979 and this is what we have become - creatures of the absurd.

Film Synopsis

Alphonse Tram, an unemployed man in his early thirties, lives with his wife Josyane in a recently constructed apartment block that is virtually uninhabited.  Late one night, Alphonse is waiting for a train on the Paris metro when he strikes up a conversation with an older man.  The latter, an accountant, becomes anxious when the younger man produces a knife and is grateful when the train shows up.  A short while later, Alphonse comes across the same man again, only this time he is dying, with the knife in his stomach.  Not long afterwards, Alphonse learns that his wife has been killed on her way home from work, although he is seemingly unperturbed when the murderer shows up on his doorstep, keen to make his acquaintance.

The only other person in the apartment block that Alphonse has met is a senior inspector of police, Morvandieu, and he too is a killer, having been driven to murder his wife to put an end to her musical pretensions.  Events take an even more bizarre turn when another resident of the tower block coerces Alphonse and his two new friends into murdering him.  As well as having a dead body to dispose of, the three men now have to deal with their victim's widow, Geneviève.  Alphonse allows her to move into his apartment, but when she shows signs of illness the widow cold-bloodedly shoots dead the doctor who is called in to attend to her, moments after he has finished making love to her.  The evening continues in this vein, with one improbable occurrence after another...