Philippe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert in Coup de torchon
Deus Irae
I liked Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me, but didn't feel entirely satisfied with it--was even less satisfied because I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. I thought it had something, despite the critical acid bath it suffered, and thought it at least in one aspect improved on the original, in the casting of baby-faced Jessica Alba as a prostitute with a taste for sadomasochism. That said, it seemed to me that Winterbottom's deadly earnest tribute to Thompson missed the taint if not the tenor of the original.
Took my re-viewing of Bernard Tavernier's Coup de torchon (Clean Slate, 1981) to clarify matters. Tavernier struggled with trying to adapt Thompson into French--he wondered how to transplant the racism against blacks, wondered how to capture the wide-open spaces of Texas, and so on. He hit upon the idea of relocating the action to the sandy plains of French West Africa (now Senegal), where, as Michael Dare in his Criterion article points out, African slaves were first shipped out for the New World.
