Coup de Torchon (1981)

You won't be disappointed!

The Worst Film Ever

How sad is this?

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

This movie amazed me. I've read most of Jim Thompson's novels (The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me), and this story "Pop. 1280" is one of his best. It is a complex and dark tale told in first person narrative by a protagonist, the Sheriff in a small Southern town, who is both a liar and a sociopathic killer, yet believes himself to be the good guy just doing the inevitable in his situation while all the while playing the town fool. It would seem a hard novel to adapt to film, but Bertrand Tavernier adapts the story to 1930's Senegal flawlessly, and captures the essence of Jim Thompson's writing better than any other film adaptation I have seen of his books. The cinematography is beautiful, long slow shots languishing on one scene after another perfectly capturing the atmosphere of the mid-day lethargy of the African desert. Great acting here too; Philippe Noiret, Isabelle Huppert and the rest of the cast are superb and utterly convincing in their roles. This film is a gem, one of the best film noirs ever.

"Coup De Torchon" is technically well-made and well-acted (as you'd expect from a French prestige picture), but it doesn't seem to have much of a point to make, unless it is trying to tell us, as Pauline Kael accurately puts it, that "killing on a small scale is less immoral than killing on a big scale". It begins as a pitch-black comedy, but it stops being funny when Noiret kills a completely innocent person; from that point on, it seems to have nowhere to go but down. At 123 minutes this film is too long, and it runs out of steam long before the end, although some scenes do retain their shock value. One major plus is the fresh-looking cinematography; on DVD, the film looks as if it was made only a few years ago. ** out of 4.

One of the best films I've ever seen, period.I have never laughed so much, then felt so guilty. BT is a genius.Every moment is pure gold, every second to be treasured.Like the best detective stories ever written, the puzzle is the least of the viewer's concerns. But rather BT submerges us in a world with which we are probably totally unfamiliar, and yet we never doubt it for a second.The cast is peerless, with Noiret rewarding the viewer with his most perfectly nuanced/sympathetic/anti- hero imaginable. No one has ever been denied an Oscar so cruelly.I have promised myself I will share this with everyone who is important to me, woe betide me if I fail.

Looking at the slew of negative comments that this movie has racked up I can't help wondering what drew these people to it in the first place. What drew ME were the names attached to it, Tavernier, one of THE great contemporary French directors, Phillipe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert, two all-time GREAT French actors. Okay, everyone has the occasional off day but when you get to THIS level of writing, acting, directing, even the bad ones eclipse by a country mile the BEST of such joke talents as Godard and Tarentino and this particular entry is far from bad if anybody asks you. So I'm left with the inescapable conclusion that all these whingers must have wandered into the movie theater thinking they were going to see Gidget Goes Hawaian or How To Stuff A Wild Bikini in which case it is easy to understand their misgivings. For the record this is an excellent example of The Biter Bit aka The Worm Turns and all the ingredients are out of the right bottle and come together in a heady and satisfying brew. 8/10