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| Courtesy of Sofracima |
Several decades before French
enfant-terrible Gaspar Noe sent shockwaves through the 2002 Cannes Film
Festival shocker Irreversible, another French director whose work still
remains largely unknown in the United States, all but singularly influenced the
development of Noe’s provocative style of New French Extreme cinema with his completely
scathing 1975 crime drama film Dupont Lajoie. Also known in some territories as The
Common Man and one of the earliest political films of his career, the film
starts out as a blasé observation of casual French racism before ballooning
into a startling and at times disturbing exercise in sociopolitical satire which
has lost none of its acerbic staying power to time.
Every summer, Georges Lajoie (Jean
Carmet) with his wife Ginette (Ginette Garcin) and son Leon (Jacques Chailleux)
get together with old friends, the Schumachers and the Colins, for a holiday on
LouLou’s campsite. The Colins’ daughter
Brigitte (a young Isabelle Huppert) has grown into a vivacious young adult
woman who more than makes her presence known at the familial gathering. One day during a local gaming event, Georges
proceeds to rape and murder Brigitte but not before dumping the body near the
barracks of immigrant Arabic workers, letting the racist mob mentality of the
campers at the event take it from there.
All the while Georges is involved from start to finish, seemingly remorseless,
in deflecting any and all suspicion away from himself.
A progenitor to both Noe’s I Stand
Alone and Irreversible if there ever was one, particularly with how
it depicts distinctly regional French racism as well as casting aspersions on
an ineffective police system more interested in maintaining general peace even
if it costs an innocent person their life in the process, Dupont Lajoie begins
innocently enough with some measure of unease before closing on the viewer like
a venus flytrap. Initially elusive and
sly before erupting into a confrontational leap into brutality, Boisset’s film
is a savage rape revenge drama as social criticism of French racism and how
much the actual wrongdoers lurk about as wolves in sheep skins.
Aided by a sardonic original score by Vladimir
Cosma and lensed handsomely in 1.66:1 by Jacques Loiseleux, Dupont Lajoie doesn’t
really show its brutal unforgiving face until the halfway mark when the style
becomes grittier with a strong emphasis on handheld cinematography. The film is carried almost entirely on the shoulders
of Jean Carmet, already a veteran actor by this point, who is tasked with
creating one of the most despicable characters in cinema history.
Conniving, self-serving, sexist and overtly
racist from start to finish, Georges Lajoie is rotten to the core but due to social
systems in place is allowed to live out his life largely undetected. Though only in a small turn as the rape
victim, Isabelle Huppert also demands our attention as, even then, one of the
great newcomer actresses who since has gone on to become one of the world’s most
renowned and respected actresses.
Still unavailable in the United States
but known to cinephiles as an indelible influence on the work of one of France’s
torchbearers of the New French Extreme and regarded as one of Yves Boisset’s
best works, Dupont Lajoie is by no means easy viewing. It is however, indeed, darkly humorous for
how it depicts mob mentality while the real perpetrator the mob is after seems
to walk through the raindrops.
Provocative
for daring to ask which is the lesser of the two crimes and for how criminals
can use racism to shield themselves from scrutiny or suspicion, Dupont
Lajoie is a brutalizing but nevertheless important contemporary French
drama which is just as blistering of a social critique now as it was when it was
first unleashed on an unsuspecting French moviegoing public back in 1975.
--Andrew Kotwicki
