Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
AFRICAN MELTDOWN MAD DOGS & FRENCHMEN I ONCE SPENT a little time in Nigeria. One night while I was there, an Englishman who had lived in Africa many years - an old "coasthand," as they said - came...
...It's pure pleasure to watch him get the upper hand in a world so petty and dizzy...
...Tavernier and veteran French screenwriter Jean Aurenche have based their script on Pop...
...Or else, he tricks these loathsome types he's surrounded with into shooting each other...
...It's no wonder that someone who lives in a world as wawa as this goes a little wawa himself at times, and shoots somebody...
...Actually, the story this movie tells doesn't concern Africa at all...
...But the truth was that it was British slang, an acronym for "West Africa Wins Again...
...These people are all obviously a bit on the wawa side as well...
...That's the craziest thing about it...
...He's the last one anybody would suspect of being able to get rid of all his enemies like this, to say nothing of his friends...
...And Coup makes the psychopathology it details feel universal...
...Later another body lies right under the noses of an entire detachment of soldiers and their colonel, who chats with Lucien, then marches his men away without noticing that someone is there bleeding to death...
...Oh well, it's a like culture...
...1280, a novel by an American writer, Jim Thompson, that's set in the southern United States...
...The local pimp humiliates Lucien in front of everybody, too, and when Lucien complains to his superior - because, Lucien tells the man, "I thought and thought and thought, and decided I didn't know what to do'' - the superior kicks Lucien right up the arse, to show him what to do...
...The result was not necessarily ambiguous suicide...
...Like A Good Man in Africa, the recent first novel by William Boyd, Coup de Torchon is a splendidly antic account of the colonial life...
...The erratic behavior, the quirks of perception and the odd, sudden, unexpected shifts of mood that we see in him infect the entire society in which he lives...
...Lucien's own wife (Stephane Audran) has living with them right in their home a man she says is her "brother," whom she pampers, strokes, and nuzzles all day long...
...The bloke had gone "wawa...
...He'd had no more to drink than he did every evening when he dropped by the men's bar after dinner...
...The English residents would tell naive visitors in hushed senses that this term was a native one, from an ancient tribal language - a juju word...
...It was a simple matter of having turned left when he came out of his parking space instead of right, as he had each night for years...
...Besides, nobody seems to care about their disappearance, or even notice it...
...The heat in this place is enough to melt all decorum and civility...
...The body of one of his victims lies out on the beach for, it seems, weeks...
...Wawa...
...He backed his car out of the parking space, swung around, and drove straight into the harbor, where he drowned, still sitting erect with his hands on the wheel, in about fifteen feet of water...
...Lucien's lot in life seems to be symbolized by the eyesore that sits in the courtyard of his apartment building directly below his own balcony - an outhouse with a half a dozen stalls, and no roof...
...It was universally acknowledged that going "wawa" was not always self-destructive...
...One bad-tempered local constantly beats his wife (Isabelle Huppert) in public, without even caring whether Lucien is standing there helpless and embarrassed...
...Set in Senegal in the late 1930s, the film is about Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret), who is the policeman in a small town...
...By playing the dolt all the time, he outsmarts everyone else at their own, venal games...
...Lucien and the hapless fellow's wife, who is also Lucien's mistress, visit it one day, driving out in a little pony cart as if going on a picnic...
...The only difference between him and the rest is that he's subtle where they're crude, he's devious where they're obvious, etc...
...Anyone could have made it...
...They had a special word for Englishmen who made mistakes like that in Nigeria, however...
...It could be a way to survive as well as perish, a saving accommodation one made to the climate, the conditions and the inevitable depression Europeans feel when stuck in some colonial backwater...
...It does so by showing the whole world it contains as if through the eyes of Lucien...
...A silly mistake...
...One night while I was there, an Englishman who had lived in Africa many years - an old "coasthand," as they said - came out of his club on Lagos Harbor and got into his car...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Judging from Bertrand Tavernier's new film, Coup de Torchon, this form of mental illness was equally widespread in French West Africa...
...We can't help but admire Lucien, even if he is cracking up in his quiet way...
Vol. 110 • February 1983 • No. 3
