Before the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino, on the other side of the Atlantic, there was Bertrand Tavernier. ‘Coup de torchon‘ (English title ‘Clean Slate‘) was made in 1981, the year Tarantino had just finished high school and three years before the Coen brothers made their first feature film. The movie is a screen adaptation of a thriller authored by an American writer named Jim Thompson, who is almost forgotten today but who in the 50s, 60s and 70s was considered the equal of Dashiel Hammett or Raymond Chandler, and who had collaborated as a screenwriter on Stanley Kubrick‘s first films, among the exceptional ‘Paths of Glory‘, one of the best anti-war films ever made. Bertrand Tavernier moves the story from a small town with 1280 inhabitants (hence the title of the book ‘Pop. 1280’) in the American South haunted by crisis and racism to a French colony in Africa in 1938, the year before the outbreak of WWII. I didn’t read the book, but according to the comments, Tavernier‘s film is Thompson‘s most faithful film adaptation. At the same time, it manages to perfectly describe the atmosphere of colonial France. A ‘film noir’ under the sun of Africa.
Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) is the only policeman in an African village, where the white minority dominates without too many scruples or excuses, because racism is a state policy. He seems like a pretty decent guy. Offenses committed by whites, whether poaching or pimping, are forgotten with a pinch of corruption. Laws do not have much value in a fundamentally unjust society, but even if the policeman wants to defend the laws, he cannot do much because he is kind of a sucker. Everyone is making fun of him – the bosses, the local villains, his wife who cheats on him with a much younger gigolo. When, exasperated, he asks the advice of the superiors, they vaguely advise him to impose himself and start a clean slate. Taking the advice seriously, Cordier triggers a series of events that honor a film noir. But under the hot sky of Africa everything seems relative, including morals, including the value of human lives. Can crime be a way to salvation, as the hero of the film seems to believe?
Philippe Noiret performs in ‘Coup de torchon‘ another one of his exceptional roles from that peak period of his career. The victim becoming an executioner is a typical ‘film noir’ character, but Tavernier and Noiret add to the character new dimensions and a welcome ambiguity. Our hero seems starts as a vigilante, but then he starts to enjoy crimes and the power of the man holding the gun. Nor does the seemingly reparation erotic liaison with Rose (Isabelle Huppert) have the chance to bring sanity back to his mind. Once slipped on the crime down spiral, returning is no longer possible. Everything happens under the bright light and hot sun of Africa, an atmosphere apparently opposite to what we are used to in films of this genre, but this cinematography only amplifies the horror effect. The final of the film is marked by the beginning of the Second World War, that is, of the times in which killing becomes a patriotic duty.