Philippe Noiret
Lucien Cordier
Search results
Coup de Torchon (also known as Clean Slate) is a 1981 French crime film directed by Bertrand Tavernier and adapted from Jim Thompson's 1964 novel Pop. 1280. The film changes the novel's setting from an American Southern town to a small town in French West Africa.
Coup de Torchon. Bertrand Tavernier's "Coup de Torchon" is a cruel intellectual joke played on its characters -- who endure boredom, self-contempt, hate, dust, flies and sometimes even death without being allowed to know they're only part of an existential parable.
Nov 4, 1981 · 1938, in a French african colony. Lucien Cordier is the cop of this village, populated with blacks and a few whites (usually racialist and lustful). He is a washout, everyone (including his wife Huguette) humiliates him. He never arrests anyone and looks at elsewhere when a dirty trick occurs.
An inspired rendering of Jim Thompson’s pulp novel Pop. 1280, Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de torchon (Clean Slate) deftly transplants the story of an inept police chief turned heartless killer and his scrappy mistress from the American South to French West Africa.
Coup de torchon (a.k.a. Clean Slate) is the most ambiguous, and possibly the most profound, of Bertrand Tavernier's films, one that continues to have a powerful resonance - indeed it seems to be more relevant today than when it was first released in 1981.
Rated: 2.5/4 Oct 23, 2004 Full Review Neely Swanson Easy Reader (California) “Coup de Torchon” is one of the most devastatingly sly, raw and brilliant indictments of man’s inhumanity to man ...
- (7)
- Comedy
In addition to its macabre sense of humor, and the brilliant performances all around—especially a young Isabelle Huppert as Cordier’s mistress—Tavernier’s use of the lingering Steadicam gives an effortless precision to Coup de torchon ’s tense and awkward energy. Print courtesy of the Institut Français.
