Coup de torchon (1981, Bertrand Tavernier) (Patreon)

46/100

Second viewing, last seen 2002. Jim Thompson's just a tough nut to crack, adaptation-wise; to my mind, only After Dark, My Sweet has really gotten it right (though I'm overdue to give The Grifters another chance and still haven't seen Série noire). Transplanting Pop. 1280 to colonial Africa in 1938 was an interesting choice, but Tavernier flattens the tone without modulating the rhetoric, which renders Thompson's nihilism at once tedious and tendentious. Cordier's murders (both perpetrated and engineered) aren't remotely exciting—we don't identify with him at all—but neither are they bone-chilling, except in the abstract. They're just sort of...bland. Which might have worked if the guy didn't continually justify his actions out loud, alternately arguing that "all crimes are collective" or that life is so horrific that he's doing his victims a favor or that society's strictures have forced him to punish the weak rather than the strong. That sort of bad-faith philosophizing works better on the page, but it's possible to get away with it onscreen if you've got someone like Bruce Dern speaking the lines and a director who'll let him (and Jason Patric, and Rachel Ward, and even George Dickerson) go just broad enough to preclude any sense of our being lectured to/at, which is death for such pulpy material. As is, even Cordier's willingness to tolerate his wife pretending that her much younger lover is her brother lacks the black-comic moral grotesquerie that's clearly required. Huppert does typically fine work, making Rose cheerfully complicit in Cordier's evil until it negatively impacts her, but poor Irène Skobline can't make coherent Anne's function as the film's symbolic conscience—the tonal neutrality defeats her. Intentions were good, but this just doesn't play, in my opinion. Though at the same time I can readily understand why others would (and indeed do) find it impassively devastating.