Coup de Torchon

Bertrand Tavernier took Jim Thompson's 1964 novel Pop. 1280 and moved it from the American South to French West Africa in the 1930s, and the relocation turns the book into something else entirely. Philippe Noiret's small town police chief looks like an incompetent everyone mocks, a man who smiles wider the more he is insulted. Then he starts killing people, and nobody notices, because in the colony a death does not cost anything. That is what makes the film uncomfortable. As a murder comedy it is very funny, but the joke is the system itself. The laziness of the white officials, their boredom and the way they look at the local population are all left unsoftened. Isabelle Huppert plays his mistress and their scenes together are the coldest in the film. The difficulty is tonal. It never tells you when to stop laughing, and some viewers read that as a moral vacuum rather than the point. Who it is for: anyone who can hold black comedy and colonial critique at once. Who it is not for: viewers who need firm moral ground.