Coup de torchon (The Criterion Collection) Blu-ray

With this existential crime thriller, legend of French cinema Bertrand Tavernier transforms Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled novel Pop. 1280 into a darkly comic, philosophically provocative exploration of the brutality and absurdity of colonialism. Moving the story’s setting from the American South to 1930s French West Africa, Coup de torchon features a frighteningly enigmatic performance from Philippe Noiret as a police chief whose seeming ineptitude masks a cold-blooded pursuit of revenge and control that draws his opportunistic mistress (a fiery Isabelle Huppert) into an escalating spiral of violence. With each chilling revelation, Tavernier plunges us ever deeper into an abyss of madness and corruption, laying bare the decaying soul of empire.

• Interview from 2001 with director Bertrand Tavernier
• New interview with critic and poet Robert Polito about source-novel author Jim Thompson
• Making-of program featuring on-set footage and interviews with members of the cast and crew
• Alternate ending
• Trailers
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by scholar Lynn Anthony Higgins