Under the knife

On the basis the above, you may not yet have twigged what sort of film Buffet froid actually is, as I’ve not really conveyed the oddness of how much of it plays out, but what happens next should soon tip you off. Having accepted his wife’s murder with a peculiar degree of resolute calm, Alphonse is eating a basic evening meal in the apartment, still wrapped in an overcoat that feels increasingly like a symbolic shield, when there’s an unexpected knock at his front door. When he cautiously answers it, he encounters a troubled looking man (Jean Carmet), who asks for a few minutes of his time to talk about his wife, immediately revealing that he was the one who killed her. Does Alphonse lose his shit and attack the man or recoil in horror? Not exactly. Instead, he calmly invites the man in, asks him if he’s eaten, and the two sit down and share his makeshift meal. When the Murderer (and I’m going to capitalise the M here as the man is never named and he’s not the only one who takes the life of another in the film and I need to have a way of identifying him) glumly pauses, and reveals that he cannot get the food down because he keeps thinking about Josyane, which Alphonse callously dismisses by telling him, “Oh, do as I do, old man. Forget about her.” When the Murderer then asks to see her room, Alphonse seems more concerned that doing so might upset the man more than he has been so far been about his wife being violently killed, but agrees to indulge him, allowing him to lovingly examine her wedding dress and even showing him a favourite photo of her. When the door buzzer suddenly sounds, Alphonse tells the Murderer not to move, and heads for the front door, pulling the partition that separates the bedroom living room closed behind him. Who should it be but Inspector Morvandieu, armed with a commiserating bottle of wine for the two to share. Instead of claiming he is busy or just heading to bed, Alphonse invites the inspector in, then heads back to the bedroom to inform the Murderer that it’s okay for him to come out because the visitor is a friend. He then cheerfully introduces him to Morvandieu as his wife’s killer and the two men shake hands, then all three then sit down at the small dining table to share the wine. They’ve not long gotten comfortable when Alphonse has to once again answer the door, this time to man named Eugène Léonard (Jean Rougerie), who also has something he wishes to talk to him about. He’s invited in, shares a glass of wine with the others and claims that he witnessed Alphonse plunging his knife into the accountant’s stomach on the Métro, an act that Alphonse still denies that he carried out. It turns out that Eugène is not here to blackmail Alphonse but to engage his services as someone with an admirable skill with a switchblade to rid him of a man who has poisoned his life. Uncertain at first, Alphonse accepts the job but declines the offered payment (“I prefer to keep everything clean”), and the following evening he, Morvandieu and the Murderer head to the car park location provided by Léonard and wait for their unnamed victim to arrive. And believe me, we’re just getting started here.

Although, plot-wise, Buffet froid is ostensibly a crime thriller, it’s firmly in the territory of surrealistic black comedy, one in which all the normal rules of narrative and character logic have been cheerfully dispensed with and where everyone reacts to even the most bizarre events and irrational behaviour as you or I might to an average day at home. There’s more than a whiff of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie era Luis Buñuel to the film’s grounded surrealism (something Blier himself confirms in the special features on this disc), and I’m far from the only one to have felt the blackly comic absurdist influence of Samuel Beckett on the dialogue exchanges. Like Buñuel, Blier’s surrealism grows out of having believable characters treat the seemingly illogical as normal in recognisably real-world locations. Where the two part company is that the odder behaviour in Buñuel’s films often can seem strange because we are unaware of their context or have developed expectations for how certain characters would normally behave. In Blier’s film, real-world logic and expectations are often turned completely on their head, and at times it can feel almost as if when writing the screenplay he would repeatedly ask himself what the audience would expect of a situation and then have his characters do or say the opposite. At times, it’s almost as if he just decided to roll the dice and let chance decide where fate might take them. Blier’s urban landscapes also differ from Buñuel’s in their spooky emptiness, with the principal characters seemingly the only inhabitants of a capital city that even back in 1979 was home to over two million people. In the opening scene, Alphonse and the accountant are the only signs of life on the platform of what became one of the busiest Métro stations in Paris, and after his second encounter with the now dying accountant, Alphonse walks across an empty plaza whose black-and-white design almost mirrors that of the apartment block above it in which he and his wife have for some time been the only tenants. Even when the film does expand beyond the initial confines of Alphonse’s apartment, the sense that the population of Paris has been thinned down to a select few individuals remains, with urban streets and open roadways weirdly clear of cars and pedestrians, unless they have a specific role to play in the unfolding story. Later, when the film makes a sudden startling switch from night and the city to a daylight soaked countryside, this sense of isolation remains – background characters simply have no place here. In terms of technique, Blier also differs from Buñuel, whose straightforward presentation of peculiar events only adds to their surrealistic air, and while Blier also shoots scenes without distracting cinematic frissons, he and cinematographer Jean Penzer make expressive use of expansive wide shots and slow camera moves and zooms that close in on or pull out from characters, often to emphasise their locational isolation.

I have little doubt that some will find Blier’s rejection of logic and his seemingly random, spin-the-wheel approach to plot development unsatisfying and annoying, and this doubtless contributed to the sometimes hostile reviews that greeted the film on its American release (it was far more positively reviewed in its native France). As a lifelong fan of Buñuel’s urban surrealism, however, I had an absolute ball. Yes, the plot development often defies logic, but it does so in a way that is oddly satisfying, in no small part due to its linguistic inventiveness. I’ll freely admit that what little French I can speak was learned in a schoolroom and a language lab half a century ago, but assuming that the translations provided by the subtitles are accurate, or at least true to Blier’s vision and intent, the often poetically logic-contrary dialogue and its expressive delivery prove to be two of the film’s principal pleasures. I also really enjoyed the continuous usurping of expectations – expectations created in part by decades of movie tradition – and at no point was I able to predict where the story would go next, what decisions the characters would make, or who they would encounter along the way. Surprisingly, perhaps, the result is not episodic but has a flow that makes every transition from one peculiar situation to another feel oddly natural and, in a peculiar way, retrospectively logical.