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A riposte to the softness of Annaud's Black and White in Color calls for a stroke of ferocity, thus Jim Thompson's Texas transposed to French West Africa ca. 1938. "Le fin du monde" in the colonial latrine, a solar eclipse at the onset points up the dark chill on a summer day. "Around here you've got to joke a little, or you'll wind up shooting yourself." The backwater's lone constable (Philippe Noiret) is a pushover about as respected as Deputy Fife, henpecked by the wife (Stéphane Audran) who passes her lover (Eddy Mitchell) off as her sponging sibling, humiliated by higher-up (Guy Marchand) and pimp (Jean-Pierre Marielle) alike. From oaf to exterminating angel is a calm crack-up, plenty of existential pensées to go with bullets. "Just getting rid of trash" while helping himself to the industrialist's frisky bride (Isabelle Huppert), the shambling psychopath in the land of termite-eaten crosses and target-practice cadavers. "You start thinking God created murder out of kindness." Bertrand Tavernier's rejection of the "humanistic filmmaker" label reveals a taste for analytical caricature, a Monsieur Verdoux to call his own. Comedy of madness, degradation of revolt, Steadicam sprawls in the void. "Les vrais Français, les Français de merde et la merde de Français," all the same in the eyes of the oppressed. Joannon's Alerte en Méditerranée screened outdoors with a benshi, a messianic confession scrawled on a blackboard translated as La Marseillaise by the schoolteacher (Irène Skobline), a world war around the corner. "Better the blind man who pisses out the window than the joker who told him it was a urinal," cf. Huston's Wise Blood. It builds to Noiret's Cowardly Lion face crumbling in metaphysical despair, "must be the climate." Claire Denis carries Huppert over to White Material. Cinematography by Pierre-William Glenn. With Michel Beaune, Jean Champion, Victor Garrivier, Gérard Hernandez, Abdoulaye Diop, François Perrot, Daniel Langlet, Mamadou Dioume, and Samba Mané.
--- Fernando F. Croce |