Critics reviews

Tavernier saves us a souçon of film noir flavor with a fine casting choice: Philippe Noiret as Lucien Cordier, the schlubby chef du police in a sleepy town overrun by greasy pimps and haughty lumber barons.

The French screenwriting titan Jean Aurenche co-wrote Coupe de torchon with director Bertrand Tavernier when Aurenche was nearly 80, but the writing roils with the vinegar and crassness of shit-stirring youth... Thanks in large part to a vivacious turn by a freckly Isabelle Huppert as Noiret's good-time girltoy, Coup de Torchon is never not a comedy, even as it digs around in bloody grey areas.

In the mistreatment and poverty of the colonized, Tavernier finds an external correlative to Cordier's internal conflict: colonialism's raging id and guilty conscience are everywhere in evidence. It's the Heart of Darkness trap, looking at Africa and seeing the soul of the white man, but it's an inspired way of dramatizing Corey/Cordier's shape-shifting moral conundrum.

Noiret does too good a job of covering up how smart Cordier really is. The change is far too jarring. Although Cordier suggested to me the character of Tom Ripley, the psychopathic killer created by novelist Patricia Highsmith, he just didn't seem as fully fleshed. Despite its shortcomings, Coup de Torchon is a fascinating film, well worth a look. It shows all the promise Tavernier would realize in his later films.

Tavernier's first seven films are widely diverse in subject and theme. In the Aurenche period, protagonists are "apparently" more isolated, less supported, foregrounded, drawn against the background rather than integrated organically into the background. The light shines on them more than on others. Storytelling is slightly more traditional. The period ends with the shock of Clean Slate, which Tavernier made as a deliberate affront to his growing reputation as a noble "humanist" filmmaker.

Like Jacques Becker in Goupi Mains Rouges, Tavernier follows screwball comedy out to its other side as madness: you're never sure whether what you're watching is high spirits or insanity, and the characters keep reversing themselves. Working with two veterans of the French "tradition of quality," set designer Alexandre Trauner and coscenarist Jean Aurenche, Tavernier created one of the freshest French films in years—it has wit, dash, and fiber.

Purists may object to Tavernier's treatment of Jim Thompson's excellent if sordid and sadistic thriller, Pop.1280, but this eccentric, darkly comic look at a series of bizarre murders is stylishly well-crafted, and thoroughly entertaining... Strange insights into the effects of racism and the complicity of its victims, embellished with black wit and an elegant visual sense.

...If I've told the three stories of COUP DE TORCHON, it's because it is clear for me that Tavernier hesitates between them. A psychological story? To what goal? And one passes to the political story. To what goal? And one passes to the metaphysical. I had the feeling of a pre-determined escape- a shame because this Christian scenario seems to interest Tavernier the man. It's Tavernier the artist who doesn't follow.