Bertrand Tavernier, Coup de Torchon: Taking out the trash

Coup de Torchon, 1981

Betrand Tavernier

Tavernier sets Coup de Torchon adapted from Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 in French West Africa 1938, where police chief Lucien Cordier, played by Philippe Noiret, inverts his perceived role as village idiot by strategically killing off those characters who think he is incapable, soft, and incorruptible and incapable of “dirty work”. Tavernier concocts a poisonous cocktail of noir-esque violence, clichés of a spaghetti Western, French colonial African style, with buffoonish clowning as Cordier poaches and disposes of living human trash through cold killings, calculated rendezvous, and disguise of stupidity and base humor. Isabelle Huppert’s Rose, his lover, and Staphane Audran’s Hugette, his wife are either insatiable, deceitful, and vain, and even Anne, Irene Skobline, contradicts him, is inaccessible, burdensome in her attentions, so in the end, women are reduced to the criminal, venomous, and disposable. Men are moving targets in this carnival shooting gallery; they too, are excessive, damaged, and contaminated where good and evil never reconcile. Cordier kicks Rose’s dying husband after he shoots him, and says “You, you won’t have a boring death.” And “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”

The camera seizes and holds hostage innocent African children crouching near enormous trees, as they dutifully recite the French anthem, and colorfully clothed local in the open market which illustrate how we exoticize and colonize through our tyranny the cultures of others with our gaze, our greed, our preferences, and our contempt. We trample lives and decide who lives and dies with little regard for humanity.

Exhumed from the dirt and excess of colonial values, racism, hypocrisy, hierarchy, and human waste, Cordier delivers the message that “all crimes are collective, and we participate in each other’s crimes”. Sublime visual poetry collides with the scatological, as Tavernier and his striking cast send us on a chase for bodies dead or alive, naked, in underwear, suits, or tribal dress to search for what is cloaked and buried within the body, our most sacred power object that holds infinite truths.