NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Criterion Blu-ray (August 2026): Criterion have transferred Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de torchon to Blu-ray. This was on DVD by Criterion back in 2001 -reviewed HERE. This special edition features a new 4K digital restoration and expands the sparse extras of the original DVD with fresh contextual material. Presented in the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio (the DVD was 1.75), significantly improves upon the older SD transfer - brighter, crisper, more balanced contrast but it does have a case of the teal-ies with blue-green dominating. It shows more information in the frame on the top and left edges. Pierre-William Glenn’s (Serie Noire, Avalanche, Boomerang, Small Change, The Judge and the Assassin, The Clockmaker, Day for Night, Out 1, Le Choc,) cinematography - characterized by pale, sun-bleached pastels, soft late-afternoon light, and a deliberately decentered, floating Steadicam aesthetic - benefits enormously from the increased resolution and finer grain structure. The dusty Senegalese exteriors, weathered colonial architecture designed by Alexandre Trauner (Port of Shadows, The Apartment, Witness for the Prosecution, Rififi, etc.) and the film’s distinctive muted color palette (beige sands, Noiret’s pink shirt etc.) appear more textured and dimensional without. Fine detail in clothing, skin, and the heat-hazed landscapes is newly visible, while the film’s naturalistic, slightly unworldly look is preserved. Contrast is well-managed in both the bright daytime sequences and the rarer darker interiors; black levels hold up without crushing shadow detail. Overall, the image retains the film’s intended “noir in pastel”, despite the teal bias, true resolution quality while offering the clarity and stability expected from a modern Criterion restoration.

NOTE: We have added 58 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE.

On their Blu-ray, Criterion use a linear PCM mono track (24-bit) in the original French language. The uncompressed monaural soundtrack is clean, balanced, and faithful to the original mix. Dialogue is clear and present, with natural spatial separation for a mono track; ambient sounds of heat, flies, distant voices, and the everyday noise of the colonial outpost are nicely rendered without hiss or distortion. Philippe Sarde’s (La Travestie, Choice of Arms, Le Choc, The Tenant, Lancelot Du Lac, The Widow Courderc, The Clockmaker of St. Paul, Madame Rosa, The Tenant, Max and the Junkman, Tess, La Grande Bouffe, Quest For Fire,) jazzy, slightly off-kilter score - ranging from tango-tinged themes to the vocal numbers performed by Stéphane Audran and Isabelle Huppert - comes through with good presence and tonal accuracy. Dynamic range is limited by the source material (as expected for a 1981 mono track.) Criterion offer optional English subtitles on their Region 'A'-locked Blu-ray.

The Criterion Blu-ray supplemental package meaningfully expands on the original ancient DVD’s offerings. The centerpiece remains the substantial 2001 3/4 hour interview with Bertrand Tavernier, in which the director discusses the adaptation of Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280, the decision to relocate the story to colonial West Africa, the Steadicam approach, political and historical context, and his collaboration with Jean Aurenche. A new 1/4 hour interview with critic and poet Robert Polito provides valuable insight into Thompson’s life, writing, and the pulp tradition that informed the novel. The 23-minute making-of program includes on-set footage and interviews with cast and crew, offering a useful window into the Senegal production and the collaborative atmosphere. Tavernier also introduces the alternate ending (shy of 4 minutes), explaining why the more literary, surreal version (involving elements closer to the novel) was ultimately discarded in favor of the released conclusion. Both the U.S. and French theatrical trailers are included. The Blu-ray package is rounded out by liner notes with a new essay by scholar Lynn Anthony Higgins - Bertrand Tavernier (French Film Directors) - and we get a striking new cover design by Sean Phillips.

Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de torchon is a mordant, philosophically dense black comedy and neo-noir that ranks among the director’s most accomplished and unsettling works. Adapted by Tavernier and longtime collaborator Jean Aurenche from Jim Thompson’s 1964 pulp novel Pop. 1280, the film relocates the story from the American Deep South of the early 20th century to a fictional French West African colonial outpost (Bourkassa) in 1938, on the eve of World War II. Shot on location in Senegal using actual weathered colonial architecture, it transforms Thompson’s hard-boiled study of amorality into a blistering allegory of colonial decay, racial hierarchy, and the collapse of moral categories. At its heart, Coup de torchon is about the erasure of the distinction between good and evil in a system built on domination. Lucien Cordier begins as a passive, humiliated figure - cuckolded by his wife Huguette (Stéphane Audran) who openly lives with her “brother”/lover Nono (Eddy Mitchell), mocked by local pimps, and treated with contempt by his superior Chavasson (Guy Marchand). After a confrontation with his boss, Cordier abruptly begins murdering those who torment him, framing others for the crimes and presenting himself as a kind of inverted Christ or “exterminating angel.” He tells one character: “I am Christ himself… There are almost no innocents left. Crimes are collective; we participate in each other’s.” This theology of collective guilt and purification through slaughter turns the “civilizing mission” of colonialism inside out: the police chief’s “clean slate” is achieved by accelerating the moral and physical rot already present in the colonial order. Racism and colonial necropolitics saturate every frame. African characters are largely silent, disposable, or treated as scenery; their deaths (including a servant boy killed for knowing too much) register as almost casual collateral. Philippe Noiret (Il Postino, Life and Nothing But, Three Brothers, Masques, Cinema Paradiso, 'Round Midnight, Fort Saganne, Le Grande Bouffe, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?, La Pointe Courte, The Judge and the Assassin, Let Joy Reign Supreme, The Clockmaker, The French Conspiracy, Murphy's War, The Night of the Generals, Zazie in the Metro) delivers one of his greatest performances as Cordier: a shambling, seemingly simple man whose blankness gradually reveals bottomless cunning and metaphysical emptiness. Isabelle Huppert (Violette, Loulou, Madame Bovary, Things to Come, Elle, The Story of Women, The Bitch, Heaven's Gate, Private Property, Entre Nous, Home, Every Man For Himself, The Bedroom Window, The Nun, Comedy of Power, Merci Pour le Chocolat, La cérémonie, Valley of Love, The Swindle, The School of Flesh, The Piano Teacher, False Confessions, Souvenir, Abuse of Weakness, EO, Time of the Wolf, Ma mère, White Material, Dead Man Down, The Crime is Mine, Claire's Camera, Happy End,) in a striking early role as the opportunistic Rose, is both vulnerable and vulgar, a perfect counterpart. Stéphane Audran (Le Boucher, Wedding in Blood, Babette's Feast, The Third Lover, The Unfaithful Wife, Just Before Nightfall, Betty, Le Choc, Cop Au Vin, La Rupture, Chicken With Vinegar, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Line of Demarcation, The Champagne Murders, Blue Panther, Bluebeard,) Jean-in a dual role; Pierre Marielle - Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Guy Marchand - The Big Red One, and Eddy Mitchell - Until the End of the World, complete a gallery of vividly grotesque colonials whose venality and self-delusion make Cordier’s “justice” feel, for a moment, almost logical. Upon release, Coup de torchon was a critical and commercial success in France (winning the Prix Louis-Delluc) and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. It remains unsettling precisely because it implicates the spectator in the colonial gaze while offering no redemptive exit: Cordier’s final isolation under a tree, gun in hand as more starving children approach, leaves the “clean slate” as a void rather than a resolution. In the end, Coup de torchon is less a conventional crime film than a metaphysical black comedy about the impossibility of innocence within systems of power. Its enduring power lies in the way it makes the absurdity of colonial (and by extension any hierarchical) violence both laughable and unbearable, forcing the audience to confront the collective crimes that no single “exterminating angel” can wipe clean. This Criterion Blu-ray is a strong - even with some tealies, a well-considered upgrade that finally brings Coup de torchon into the high-definition era with a restoration that respects the film’s unique visual texture and tonal complexity. While the extras are not exhaustive (a full commentary track would have been welcome), the combination of Tavernier’s thoughtful archival interview, the new Polito piece on Thompson, the making-of material, and the alternate ending provides solid context for one of the most original and unsettling French films of the early 1980s. For admirers of Tavernier, Noiret, or colonial-era black comedy, this is the definitive home-video edition to date - an essential addition for Criterion collectors and a film that continues to reward (and disturb) repeated viewings.

Gary Tooze