Coup de torchon (1981)
Directed by Bertrand Tavernier

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.

Film Synopsis

1938, West Africa.  Lucien Cordier is the police chief of a small French colonial town, Bourkassa Ourbangui, but no one takes him seriously.  There is vice and corruption all around him, but he is too set in his oafish ways to care.  He gets a rude awakening when one day a racist military man named Chavasson shows up and publicly humiliates him.  Believing he is acting under Chavasson's orders, Cordier then goes out and shoots dead two owners of a brothel.  It is the start of his campaign to clean up the area under his jurisdiction, whilst providing plenty of trade for the town's undertakers.  Cordier then confronts Mercaillou, his mistress's bullying husband, and kills him in cold blood, making it look like an accident.  To conceal the crime, he is then forced to kill a black servant.  Suspecting that her husband has a mistress, Cordier's wife Huguette has made up her mind to elope with her lover Nono, having stolen some money from the now chronically homicidal police chief.  Cordier watches contentedly as a fight between his mistress Rose and his wife's lover ends with the former shooting dead the latter, along with his wife.  All too late, Rose realises the monster that Cordier has become...