COUP DE TORCHON / CLEAN SLATE (69)

Directed by: Bertrand Tavernier (1982)

Starring: Philippe Noiret, Isabelle Huppert, Stephane Audran

The Pitch: In 1930s West Africa, an ineffectual police chief turns to murder as the answer to his problems.

Theo Sez: Half-great half-annoying, and hellishly difficult to separate the two: more mixed feelings than any film I can remember. Tavernier's complicated version of pulpmeister Jim Thompson's "Pop. 1280" is, in parts, among the most dazzlingly original movies of the 80s, an absurdist black comedy that transposes Thompson's nasty, nihilistic worldview to the heat-maddened, inherently unreasonable world of colonial Africa. It stars the magnificent Noiret, who's in every scene as the weak, live-and-let-live police chief, fending off insults with a phlegmatic "You may be right, but then again you may be wrong" (anyone who dislikes the actor - like Pauline Kael, who knows "no better reason for not going to a movie than that he's the crestfallen, half-asleep star of it" - will inevitably hate this movie); and it's full of devastatingly funny moments, juxtaposing bleak, murderous noir with savage burlesque - it cuts from the shocking scene of our hero slaughtering the innocent black man straight to the Blimpish preening of Colonel Tramichel ("Tra as in tralala, Michel as in Michel"). There's a fierce audacity to it, playing with our emotions to blend Thompson's amoral view of a rotten world with its own, liberal point about the evils of colonialism without actually saying so. Unfortunately, in between the various highlights it does say so, at length and with excruciating explicitness, turning into a half-baked symbolic drama and giving its hero any number of clunky speeches to explain his behaviour - which would be bad enough even if the speeches added up to a coherent characterisation, which they don't. Instead, each little chunk of philosophy turns him into something new - first he's an amiable bumbler, then secretly crafty, then an avenging angel, then a wise man, then a madman - none of it visualised or reflecting what's onscreen, finally defeating even the redoubtable Noiret. Trouble is, every time one despairs of the film it contrives yet another treasurable moment - just as, whenever it looks like it's about to take off, it grinds to a halt with another laboured homily. One could call it an interesting failure, or perhaps a relic from a time (or the tail-end of a time) when European films were expected to be challenging and a little obscure, to provide material for post-movie arguments - before the easily-digestible took over, and Tavernier himself was lost to production values and D'ARTAGNAN'S DAUGHTER. The extraordinary opening sequence - not explained till the very end - would alone earn it a second viewing. On a stunningly sere African plain a group of little boys play in the dirt; in the shade of a baobab tree our hero watches them, shaking with sobs, while on the soundtrack the music builds and builds to a wild, jangly, wholly puzzling crescendo - then suddenly stops, and we're pitched into the story. It's how one imagines a newborn baby feels as it hurtles, through noisy chaos, into the world.