Tip Top (2013)
Directed by Serge Bozon

Film Review

Serge Bozon is not the kind of film director who goes out of his way to attract a large audience.  In fact, judging by his work to date, he seems to be going to extraordinary lengths to distance himself from the mainstream and set himself up as the kind of critic-friendly auteur that audiences love to hate, or at least feel justified in ignoring.  Six years after he triggered a tsunami of consternation with his WWI musical La France (2007), Bozon is back with an even stranger concoction of ill-fitting genres, a deranged union of film noir, murder mystery and black comedy that makes cinema feel like an extreme sport.  Tip Top is one of those idiosyncratic digressions into virgin weirdness that you will either love or hate, and even if you hated Bozon's earlier films, there's still a chance that you may warm to this charmless oddity.  Like David Lynch, Bozon has a knack of skewing the banal and making it appear scarily familiar.

Tip Top is adapted from a pulp fiction crime novel of the same title by the British author Bill James.  It was scripted by Bozon and Odile Barski in collaboration with Axelle Ropert, the co-author of Bozon's previous three films who has recently embarked on her own directing career with La Famille Wolberg (2009).  Thanks to Bozon's flair for inverting normality, what could have been a fairly routine policier ended up as something far less predictable, a totally off-the-wall comedy that not only pokes fun at the inadequacies of the French police but also offers a bitter commentary on France's unendingly problematic relationship with Algeria.  The plot is just about the least important element of the film, which is just as well given that it is pretty well incomprehensible and was probably never intended to make sense.  The facile story of two senior cops investigating the death of an informer is just the pretext for a scathing satire sans frontières, one that risked an outright ban through its attempt to personify the whole of France's police system as three psychotic individuals who have each elevated their private perversions to a fine art, all for the social good.

First off there is the grotesque double act formed by Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain, two of France's great acting talents who clearly have no qualms over playing the most extreme parodies of their familiar screen personas.  Huppert is the cold schoolmistress type who looks on pain (both given and received) as an essential part of human experience.  Having spent the day beating people up in the course of her professional duties, she spends a happy evening indulging in a connubial punch-up with her devoted husband (Samy Naceri, no stranger to police maltreatment).  Kiberlain, by contrast, is about as terrifying as an agoraphobic deer, although her aptitude for unnerving people just by staring at them with her doe-like eyes makes her a more than capable police officer.  The downside is that, being pathologically fearful of physical contact, she has a far less adventurous love life than Huppert and has to take what pleasure she can as a solitary voyeur.  Luckily, she has a more than obliging across-the-road neighbour to help her make an honest woman of herself.

To this scary duo, an accidental tribute act to the Marquis de Sade and Peeping Tom, we must add François Damiens, a completely self-unaware poseur who manages to freak people out just by trying to be nice to them.  Damiens' attempts to ingratiate himself with the immigrant community (a not-too-subtle allusion to France's past efforts to remain on good terms with the people of Algeria) are hideous to watch and end up appearing more offensive than a tirade of xenophobic invective.  Here we have modern policing in a nutshell - the thug, the watcher and the hand-holding weirdo.  It's hard to know which member of this terrible trinity is the scariest, although nothing disconcerts more than the sight of Huppert sticking out her tongue, like some uglier species of reptile, to catch blood dribbling from a cut on her nose.  It's an image that is repeated far too often, knotting your stomach every time it hits your retina, and, barring the merciful release brought by a degenerative brain disorder, it will most likely stick in your head until you die.  Watching Huppert, Kiberlain and Damiens eat is also a pretty unnerving experience - even George Romero's flesh-eating zombies showed better dining etiquette.  For those who like their socially conscious comedies pungent, unpredictable and mildly repellent, Tip Top definitely hits the spot, although, like all good things when taken to excess, it may make you sick.

Film Synopsis

After an informer of Algerian origin is killed in Villeneuve, a nondescript little town in northern France, two senior police officers, Esther Lafarge and Sally Marinelli, are sent to investigate.  Right from the start, Esther and Sally fail to hit it off with Robert Mendès, the detective who was the dead man's police contact and whose cack-handed attempts to build bridges with the town's immigrant community are as subtle as they are effective.  Esther's addiction to casual violence not only assists in her day job, it also adds spice to her love life, although the cuts and grazes she sustains in her off-duty hours are apt to be misinterpreted.  Sally, by contrast, is a timid soul who, despite her admiration for Esther, has an aversion to any kind of physical contact.  Rather than get into a fight, she merely unnerves people by staring at them, and you'd never guess she was a compulsive voyeur.  With two such determined cops on the case it is only a question of time before the killer is unmasked and order can be resumed to the peaceful little town of Villeneuve, once a few more litres of blood have been spilled...