Coup de torchon: “All Crimes Are Collective”

Tavernier wisely set aside that draft. Instead, he bookended the film with two takes of a scene that is equally disconnected from the narrative. The opening sequence shows a desert landscape, where Lucien watches emaciated children digging in the sand for grubs to eat. A solar eclipse darkens the horizon, and the children begin to shiver. Lucien comes forward to build a small fire to warm them. We might be at the dawn of civilization. Lucien seems both protective and paternalistic, at once Prometheus, Christ, and the original colonizer, bringing warmth and enlightenment into a scene of poverty and darkness. The scene is mute except for Philippe Sarde’s otherworldly and discordant score, part jazz, part space music, thoroughly alarming and disorienting. The ending sequence returns abruptly to the same locale. Lucien squats under a baobab tree, an anguished expression on his face. He fingers his pistol, which he aims alternately at the children and at himself. Although this ending is continuous with the film’s beginning, now, after much mayhem, the scene is inflected differently. Lucien has failed to cast out darkness and hunger, and he has redefined his job as putting people out of their misery. No longer Prometheus bringing enlightenment, he has turned into the ultimate antihero: Lucifer, bearer of light, in the form of a firearm. After the first (the opening) version of the scene, Lucien stumbles back toward town, chased by a swaying Steadicam, as we hear the film’s first line: “I thought it was the end of the world.” That lament will recur twice more, suggesting the eclipse of a way of life.

Between these sequences, we witness the slow erosion of a character and a society. We initially sympathize with Lucien and wonder how he tolerates the degradations and humiliations visited on him by village lowlifes and even Marcel (Guy Marchand), his police counterpart in a larger nearby town. But we gradually come to understand that Lucien’s thickheaded-oaf persona is a facade, and that he is smarter than he lets on. He punishes his tormentors by manipulating them, laying clever traps that set them up to wipe one another out, while he looks on, feigning resigned impotence.

Contributing to the film’s moral and aesthetic complexity—and perhaps also to the viewer’s occasional disorientation—is that it never settles into a stable, recognizable genre. Is it tragedy or melodrama? Dystopia or slapstick? The answer is: all of the above. As its eclipse theme suggests, Coup de torchon clearly offers an apocalyptic vision: institutions have abdicated their moral authority, and divine intervention is no longer expected. All that remains is laughter. At the same time, there are bittersweet film-noir moments: Lucien and Rose’s farewell, for instance, underlined by Rose’s trench coat, evokes Casablanca and Jean Gabin classics like Pépé le moko.

The most sustained genre at play is Tavernier’s favorite, the western, with its tales of expansion and nation-building. The official rationale for Horace Greeley’s famous injunction to “go west, young man” was America’s manifest destiny to spread civilization into the wilderness. From there, it’s only a short step to the French mission civilisatrice that rationalized colonial conquest. Tavernier adapts recognizable tricks of the genre. As in Victor Fleming’s The Virginian, for example, a schoolteacher’s arrival in Wyoming from Vermont activates recognizable binaries that animate the western: America’s East Coast/western “frontier” divide is easily transposed to the French metropole/colonial settlement. Civilized institutions and prim manners are associated with femininity, while disregard for the law and disheveled cowboy masculinity align with the outpost. And so on. The western is a subgenre of melodrama, too, where social dramas lurk behind intimate ones, and Coup de torchon fully exploits this capacity for allegory.

Forever a Lyonnais at heart, Tavernier once declared that “a film is like a meal.” Much of the pleasure of his films stems from the creative team of colleagues he gathered around his table like a family, welcoming input from everyone on both sides of the camera. Tavernier was a voracious reader, a habitué of the theater, and enormously knowledgeable about music, particularly jazz. All of these passions provided sources of inspiration and informed his choices of collaborators.

Already, for his first feature, he was able to enlist Noiret, who even helped finance the project. A cinematic legend, Noiret would consider his numerous performances for Tavernier to be the highlight of his career. Coup de torchon attracted several other Tavernier veterans, notably Isabelle Huppert as Rose and Jean-Pierre Marielle as a pimp and his twin. To this team of old friends, Tavernier added some stellar discoveries. Eddy Mitchell, a contemporary of the more famous rocker Johnny Hallyday, had contributed songs to Tavernier’s A Week’s Vacation (1980); in Coup de torchon, he plays the farcical and disturbing Nono. Behind the camera, too, Tavernier enlisted his familiar team—cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn, editor Armand Psenny, costume designer Jacqueline Moreau, composer Philippe Sarde—along with some inspired newcomers. He successfully recruited celebrated production designer Alexandre Trauner, who had lived in Africa, and who had designed films for such luminaries as Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, and Marcel Carné. Trauner would later create the moody, blue-toned sets for ’Round Midnight (1986), Tavernier’s tribute to jazz.

And let’s not forget the screenplay. Tavernier’s first feature had provoked a major kerfuffle because he chose the screenwriting team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, thereby giving the impression of casting his lot with the “cinema of quality” that preceded the nouvelle vague. Nevertheless, he cowrote two of his early features with the pair and then, after Bost died in 1975, he scripted Coup de torchon with Aurenche alone. Tavernier would go on to adapt a novel by Bost for the immensely successful A Sunday in the Country (1984); Safe Conduct, his 2002 drama about the cinema industry during the occupation, is based in part on memoirs by Aurenche.

Aurenche and Bost had been in the business for decades and had signed numerous titles, such as René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952) and Gervaise (1956), that are now considered masterpieces. But the pair became associated with a postwar cultural policy designed to raise the profile of French national cinema in order to counterbalance the influx of American films (implicitly a “cinema of quantity”) that was a condition of the Marshall Plan. Many of the “quality” films were indeed uninspired adaptations of French literary classics, in a style rejected by the Young Turks of the New Wave. “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” François Truffaut’s misguided 1954 manifesto in Cahiers du cinéma, served as a rallying cry, and “Aurenchébost” were effectively blacklisted by leading filmmakers and producers for almost two decades. Tavernier chose to bring them back for their masterly dialogue. He especially appreciated their wacky humor in Claude Autant-Lara’s postwar occupation comedy, La traversée de Paris (1956), and the covert Resistance themes in the apparently anodyne Douce (1943), also directed by Autant-Lara. Tavernier also relished their company and needed the perspective of an older generation for his father-son story in The Clockmaker of St. Paul.

Thanks in large part to its script cowritten with Aurenche, Coup de torchon is difficult to classify into a genre or trend or movement or style. What can be said is that, like all Tavernier’s films, this one is deeply engaged in social issues while remaining playfully experimental, mixing moods and tones from anger through hope, disillusionment, even hilarity. So instead of pinning it down, we might instead conclude quite simply that it’s a masterpiece.