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Case of the Great Terror of the Southeast, "maybe the biggest after the Dreyfus Affair." Wandering the countryside with a couple of bullets lodged in the brain, leaving a trail of violated and butchered youth, the former sergeant turned Gallic Ripper (Michel Galabru). Spurning beloved (Cécile Vassort) and rabid dog lie at the bottom of his torment, such a fulminating nuisance that even fellow asylum patients get up and leave when he begins raving. "L'anarchiste de Dieu" in his own mind, his counterpart is the provincial magistrate (Philippe Noiret), a bourgeois bachelor who lives with his mother and knows a chance for political advancement when he sees one. After the capture in nature, the mental landscape of interrogation, cf. Fleischer's The Boston Strangler. "You can never be too fanatical about the truth." Bertrand Tavernier has Lang's murderer in one hand and Renoir's vagrant in the other, a fitting farce for the unsettled land on the cusp of a new century. Crosses and corpses in bucolic vistas, Zola books are for burning and soup is for those who sign anti-Semitic petitions. "A new crime every day, like in the serials," says the proletarian mistress (Isabelle Huppert). The prisoner demands his letters be published along with his picture, the judge recognizes a scapegoat and manipulates a confession, one plays at madness and the other at normalcy. Songs in a Brechtian vein, Mirabeau quotes courtesy of the prosecutor (Jean-Claude Brialy) back from Cochinchina: "He thinks we're all potential murderers. We channel our murderous tendencies into legal enterprise." Royalist meeting ("Tout ce qui est national est nôtre") invaded by scarlet banners, Landru postscript, official and unofficial killings. Tavernier fuses the opposite numbers for the thematic continuation of Coup de Torchon. Cinematography by Pierre-William Glenn. With Renée Faure, Jean-Roger Caussimon, Jean Bretonnière, François Dyrek, Monique Chaumette, and Yves Robert.
--- Fernando F. Croce |