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Thursday, March 30, 2023

COUP DE TÊTE / HOTHEAD (1979)

Patrick Dewaere is spectacular (and spectacularly brave) in this scorched-earth farce about a reserve soccer player in a third-tier town who takes revenge on . . . well, on just about everyone.  Inadvertently injuring the club’s star player during practice, Dewaere is  permanently escorted off the field, loses his factory job, gets dumped by his partner (hubby’s come home), run out of town; falsely convicted on a trumped up rape charge, and finally left to rot in prison.  All but that mistress mix-up orchestrated by the city’s leading citizen, an ‘upstanding’ businessman who owns the team, owns the factory, owns the cops and the prison warden.  Dreaming of revenge in his cell (especially about making a ‘collect call’ on the woman who claimed rape), Dewaere miraculously gets his chance when a bus accident leaves the team short a man for the semi-finals and he’s the only legit player close enough to make game time.  Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (who usually leans toward epic seriousness, here letting his inner Blake Edwards out); written by French comedy master Francis Veber (sampling Ben Jonson cynicism toward the human condition); so much right in here on professional sports, fickle fans, political expedience, moral compartmentalism, corrupt government, the lure of personal revenge and the satisfaction of self-limitation.  All but perfectly structured and executed, the film takes no prisoners and asks no mercy.  Hilarious, appalling and painfully believable.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Among social satires, perhaps only THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT/’52 takes on all comers with equally hard-headed honesty, outsized laughs and a sort of grim melancholy.  There Alec Guinness; here Dewaere, rare masters of the unsentimental little man.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-man-in-white-suit-1951.html

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