Film Review
An astute commentary on France's shameful colonialist past or a
pessimistic assessment of how the wealthy, self-interested West still
continues to regard the poor developing countries?
Coup de torchon (a.k.a.
Clean Slate) is the most ambiguous,
and possibly the most profound, of Bertrand Tavernier's films, one that
continues to have a powerful resonance - indeed it seems to be
more relevant today than when it was first released in 1981. The
film is an inspired transposition of Jim Thompson's 1964 American crime
novel
Pop 1280 (released in
France under the title
1275
âmes) from Texas circa 1910 to French West Africa on the
eve of WWII. A few years previously, Alain Corneau had adapted
another of Thompson's novels as
Série noire (1979), a
similarly darkly comedic study in human nature with a subtle political
subtext.
Whilst Corneau's
Série noire
and Tavernier's
Coup de torchon
cover similar territory (both revolve around a pathetic but likeable
rogue who ends up killing people without compunction) and have similar
shock value (which is accentuated by an incongruous comedic slant),
visually the two films could not be more different. Tavernier
creates a modern film noir with none of the familiar film noir
cinematic devices, shooting the film entirely on location in the
Saint-Louis district of northwest Senegal. Philippe Sarde's
jaunty jazz score and Pierre William Glenn's sun-drenched photography
suggest the antithesis of a conventional film noir, and yet the film is
as cruel and cynical as any French film noir of this era. The
most inspired touch is the use of the Steadicam (the hand-held camera
which was one of the great cinema innovations of the late 1970s) - not
only does this help to make the spectator feel like a voyeur,
distancing him from the events depicted on the screen, it also creates
an unsettling sense of a world that lacks both stability and a moral
centre. Watching the film is like trying to find your bearings in
the middle of a desert - you are constantly struggling, and failing, to
find a point of reference: a deeply unsettling experience.
Coup de torchon picks up where
Tavernier's earlier historical film
Le Juge et l'assassin (1976)
left off. Both films are concerned with a theme that is central
to Tavernier's oeuvre: the abuse of power for their own (dubious) ends
by amoral individuals occupying positions of authority. As in the
earlier film, Philippe Noiret plays the central protagonist who is
ultimately driven to inflict his warped idea of justice on an imperfect
world. The role is one that appears tailor-made for Noiret, an actor
renowned for playing ambiguous characters with an avuncular charm and a
subtly disturbing edge. (Noiret was Tavernier's favourite actor
and appears in nine of his films). The beauty of Noiret's
portrayal of Cordier, a slobby laissez faire cop who turns killer when
he finally grows tired of being treated as a laughing stock, is its
impenetrable ambiguity. We can never be sure whether Cordier is
sane or mad. There may well be a rational basis to his actions;
he may genuinely believe he is morally justified in what he does.
Or he may equally be totally unhinged, randomly killing anyone he takes
a dislike to.
Despite his penchant for cold-blooded homicide, Cordier still manages
to be the most sympathetic character in the film. In his
blackboard confession at the end of the film, he signs his name as
Jesus Christ, and he certainly has a Christ-like sanctity about him as
he goes about trying to clean up a town mired in vice and
corruption. Like Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name character in
A Fistful of Dollars, Cordier
is merely doing what comes natural to him as he assumes the role of
exterminating angel. Surely it is no coincidence that
Cordier is so similar to
Cordelier, an order of Franciscan
monks who, in the Middle Ages, devoted their lives to healing the
infirm, in particular victims of the plague? Cordier's
vocation is just as noble: to remove the cancerous elements that
threaten the well-being of his community. There are, as he
eloquently reminds us, far worse crimes than killing people.
Which is more offensive: a white thug beating up a harmless black child
for no good reason, or said white thug being cleanly dispatched with a
bullet? If Cordier is mad, there is a method in his
madness. If he is sane, he can exonerate himself with chilling
ease.
Tavernier's mise-en-scène is as slick and dramatically effective
as ever, but it is Philippe Noiret's central performance that most
elevates
Coup de torchon to
the status of a classic and makes it such a memorable and disturbing
film. Noiret is one of those rare actors that we are compelled to
sympathise with, no matter how loathsome the character he portrays, and
here, in possibly his most morally repugnant film role, he drags us
into some very dark places. Around Noiret, Tavernier has the good
sense to assemble a cast of comparable ability, which includes such
stars as Isabelle Huppert (deliciously saucy in one of her first
leading roles), Stéphane Audran (cast, not for the first time,
as the unfaithful monster of a wife), and Jean-Pierre Marielle (playing
two completely different but physically indistinguishable
characters). Eddy Mitchell gets to shine in his first significant
screen role - he was already established as one of France's leading
rock musicians and was set to have an equally high profile career as a
film actor in the 1980s and 90s. Another familiar actor early in
his career is Guy Marchand, who would later find lasting fame as the
lead character in the popular long-running French TV detective series
Nestor Burma. Irène
Skobline has a striking presence in the one prominent role of her
inexplicably short screen career (her only other film credits are minor
roles in two Eric Rohmer films - she plays the self-effacing school
teacher Anne, the token innocent in a brutish ensemble of lowlife,
hypocrites and killers.
Despite the highly controversial nature of its subject matter,
Coup de torchon proved to be a huge
hit with the French cinema-going public. It attracted an audience
of 2.2 million in France on its first release and was one of the most
commercially successful films of what is now generally acknowledged to
be a vintage year for French cinema. Critical reaction to the
film was, however, far less favourable. The film was nominated
for ten Césars in 1982 (in categories that included Best Film,
Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress) and also for the Oscar for
the Best Foreign Language Film in 1983, but it failed to win any of
these awards. Since its release,
Coup de torchon has undergone a
considerable critical reappraisal and is now considered one of the
great French film classics of the 1980s. Bizarrely, Tavernier has
claimed the film to be his most autobiographical (which perhaps says
more about the director than we need to know).
In common with much of Bertrand Tavernier's work,
Coup de torchon has no clear
message or moral perspective; it is left to the spectator to decide
what the film means and how it relates to the world today. It is
a film which is intentionally provocative, far more so than any other
film that Tavernier subsequently made, and this may account for the
lukewarm critical reception it had on its initial release. It is
also one of Tavernier's most accomplished works, a film that admits
various interpretations and which is stylish, thought-provoking and
entertaining, even if most of its humour is of a very dark hue
indeed. It is tempting to see Philippe Noiret's character
as a metaphor for the West's ambivalence towards the developing world
(Africa in particular). When we first meet Cordier, he is content
to put up with all the corruption and misery that surrounds him.
He has the power to clean things up, but he chooses not to, convinced
that the little he can do will make no difference in the long
run. Then, when he wakes up to the fact that everyone thinks he
is a fool, Cordier allows himself to be projected to the other extreme
and makes himself judge, jury and executioner, destroying anyone he
takes offence to and convincing himself he is morally justified in
doing so. It is far easier to see real world parallels with the
film today than when it was first seen in 1981 - how could it not,
after the two great failures of Western foreign policy that were the
Rwanda genocide (1994) and the Iraq War (2003-2011)? How
easy it is to superimpose on Cordier the faces of the world leaders who
have shamed the West with their misguided actions (and non-actions) in
recent years. With apologies to George Bernard Shaw, power is
wasted on the powerful.
© James Travers 2012
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Next Bertrand Tavernier film:
Un dimanche à la campagne (1984)