Coup de Torchon

Coup de Torchon (1981) is Bertrand Tavernier's pitch-black crime comedy adapted from Jim Thompson's pulp novel Pop. 1280 — watch it online on iFILM. Philippe Noiret plays Lucien Cordier, a small-town police chief in late-1930s French colonial West Africa who has spent years absorbing humiliation from everyone around him: local pimps, a contemptuous gendarme, a cheating wife. He never draws his gun. Then one day he does.

What follows is not a thriller about catching a killer — the killer is front and centre from the start. Cordier begins settling scores with chilling patience, each death dressed up as misadventure or self-defence. Isabelle Huppert plays his mistress, Stéphane Audran his wife; neither has any idea who they are dealing with. The colonial setting is not incidental. Tavernier uses it to strip away the usual moral scaffolding: in a place where law is already a farce, Cordier's logic holds a horrible internal consistency.

Thompson's original novel was written in the first person, and the film keeps that suffocating point of view — you watch a man who is clearly dangerous explain, quite reasonably, why every murder was justified. Stream Coup de Torchon (1981) online on iFILM.