FILM VIEW; OBSCURITY AND COMEDY BLEND TO BUOY 'COUP DE TORCHON'
Illustrations: photo of movie scene
A movie doesn't have to be altogether clear to be immensely satisfying. Take, for example, Bertrand Tavernier's new French film, ''Coup de Torchon'' (translated by its distributors as ''Clean Slate''), which starts out as a conventional if exotic comedy, set in a small, parched town in French West Africa in 1938, and turns into a most provocative, wittily misanthropic melodrama set in the landscape of the soul.
When we first see Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret), the mildmannered chief of police in Bourkassa, he seems to be a prototypical W.C. Fields character, but without Fields's saving grace of readily expressed fury at careless wives and slovenly in-laws. As Lucien moves around Bourkassa, he accepts the most outrageous insults from the other French colonials with nothing more than sheepish resignation. That which would produce rage in any other man prompts, in Lucien, an embarrassed shrug.
A couple of seedy pimps pay him a bribe to overlook some minor infraction of the law and then, for laughs, dump him in the river with the bodies of black Africans who have died in a dysentery epidemic. When Lucien sees Rose (Isabelle Huppert), his pretty young mistress, being seriously beaten in the street by her husband, he cannot bring himself to help her. He assures a friend, without too much conviction, that it isn't because he's a coward but because the bystanders, knowing his relationship with Rose, would misunderstand his intervention.
Things are equally bad at home. His comically shrewish wife, Huguette (Stephane Audran), devotes herself slavishly to Nono (Eddy Mitchell), her younger brother, a large, lumpish man who hangs around the house all day, half-dressed and often eating Lucien's food.
If Mr. Noiret has the W.C. Fields part, Miss Audran is Cora Witherspoon and Mr. Mitchell is Grady Sutton. Lucien seems to be the last person in Bourkassa to suspect that Nono may not be Huguette's brother and that Nono and Huguette, who hug and kiss a lot, are, in fact, lovers.
''Coup de Torchon'' initially looks to be a kind of adult tworeeler - there's even a running gag about an outdoor privy - and then, imperceptibly, reveals itself to be a metaphysical mystery story, a fascinating one but one whose meaning I'm still trying to figure out. It's not as nice a movie as it originally appears to be. It's a lot like Lucien. Within its rather droll frame, there beats a possibly psychopathic heart.
Lucien is the most complex role that Mr. Tavernier has yet presented Mr. Noiret since they began their collaborations with ''The Clockmaker'' and ''Let Joy Reign Supreme,'' the historical comedy in which Mr. Noiret gave a bravura performance as Philippe of Orleans, regent for Louis XV during his minority. From the eerie beginning of ''Coup de Torchon,'' during an eclipse of the sun, until its desolate end, Lucien remains an enigma, but the film is of such consistent style and intelligence that we are with it all the way.
Lucien, it turns out, is not quite as impervious to insult as he first appears. After his confrontation with the two pimps, he seeks out a friend in the gendarmerie. ''I thought and thought,'' he tells the amused, patronizing friend, ''and finally came to the decision: I don't know what to do.''
''It's simple,'' says the other, in effect. ''Fight back.'' To illustrate the point, the gendarme twice kicks the ever-gullible Lucien in the seat of the pants so forcefully that he goes flying through a closed door into the adjacent waiting room. The sight of Lucien, sprawled on the floor, his dignity lost, causes a good deal of merriment and relieves the boredom of the black Africans sitting there, waiting on the whims of a colonial bureaucracy.
Thus enlightened, Lucien takes into his own hands a little more of the law than he's entitled to administer. First he shoots the two pimps and throws their bodies into the river. Not long afterward, he murders Rose's nasty husband, which delights her. This, however, leads Lucien farther and farther into uncharted psychological territory where, to survive, he must assume the role of God.
He doesn't hesitate to murder a loyal African servant who could testify against him, but not before patiently explaining to the terrified man that he deserves execution for collaborating with his oppressors. Eventually Lucien even uses the innocent Rose, whose only sin is a fondness for making love as often as is physically possible, to settle accounts with Rose and Nono.
Does Lucien really mean it when he tells the pretty French school teacher, newly arrived in Bourkassa, that he is Jesus? I'm not at all sure, nor are there any hints in the generally excellent screenplay. At one point Lucien talks moodily about all crimes being collective. At another point he says he's tired of taking the blame for everything that people want him to do - his murders -and won't do themselves. Toward the end he explains himself, ''I just help people reveal their true nature.'' The things he says are muddled but the character is not. He's a man standing at the end of a worn-out highway.
Whether or not Lucien is certifiably nuts, at least in our terms, is not the issue of Mr. Tavernier's fiction. Lucien functions within the film as a logical extension of the colonial system in which, as he says, one can no longer recognize the difference between good and evil. Expediency and compromise have erased the line of demarcation.
Among other things ''Coup de Torchon'' is a welcome relief from various film fantasies in which people (''Stars Wars,'' ''The Empire Strikes Back'') or mythological creatures (''Lord of the Rings,'' ''The Dark Crystal'') represent opposing forces of good and evil not by what they do but by how they dress and whether or not they are sweet and cuddly. Mr. Tavernier doesn't introduce such abstractions, but he does show us a world that is remarkable for their absence.
I don't want to make ''Coup de Torchon'' sound lugubrious because, although it's not exactly heartwarming, it is an unusual kind of film that manages to be most entertaining about subjects generally thought to be solemn and ''serious.''
Mr. Tavernier has come a long way since he was a film critic and scholar. Though I've not been especially enthusastic about a couple of his recent films - ''A Week's Vacation'' was about as galvanizing as its title -he now appears to stand in the forefront of the post-New Wave French filmmakers. To those of us 3,000 miles away, he represents an interesting reconciliation between new French cineastes and those French establishment directors of the 1940's and 1950's against whom Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol turned their youthful scorn.
It's not by chance that his favorite screenplay collaborator is Jean Aurenche, who, with Pierre Bost, wrote ''Le Diable au Corps,'' ''Le Ble en Herbe,'' ''The Red and the Black'' and other ''films of quality'' that so enraged Mr. Truffaut and his friends. Mr. Aurenche, now 78, brings to Mr. Tavernier's films a gift for solid construction and dramatic shapeliness that, at best, do not take the place of substance but, instead, illuminate it.
''Coup de Torchon,'' which has been picked to represent France in the competition for this year's foreign-film Oscar, is not a literary film, although it was adapted by Mr. Tavernier and Mr. Aurenche from a novel, Jim Thompson's ''Pop. 1280.'' Mr. Tavernier is a filmmaker, not someone who photographs prose.
One of the pleasures of ''Coup de Torchon'' is watching how Mr. Tavernier creates the very particular world of Bourkassa with a minimum of exposition. The flatness of the landscape, the heat, the dust, the sudden windstorms that appear from nowhere, the anonymous black faces that observe everything without visible emotion -these all belong to a specific place in West Africa, but they also describe a civilization.
Though much of the film is extremely funny, there is throughout it a feeling of unstated dread that the seemingly random lunacies accentuate. Example: the local priest busily nailing a Christ figure to a new wooden cross. Termites, he explains, have eaten away two earlier ones.
More important is one's awareness that a mature, self-assured talent is in charge - a storyteller one wants to listen to and trusts.
Mr. Noiret and all of the other members of the cast are very fine. It's especially good to see Miss Huppert in such a lively, funny role, and not in the state of permanent shock in which she usually appears. Miss Audran remains one of France's most elegant comediennes, even when she's supposed to be a provincial shrew. Also noteworthy are Jean-Pierre Marielle, who has a dual role, and Victor Garrivier, who plays Miss Huppert's husband, a fellow so property conscious that he paints a line down their dog's back, one side being his to pet, the other hers. ''Coup de Torchon'' is a film for grownups.
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