Den Mörder trifft man am Buffet

Imagine a crime film without all the usual elements - a beginning (crime), middle (investigation) and end; a guilty criminal and an investigative detective; a femme fatale who is punished; a restoration of order. BUFFET FROID is the nightmare flipside of the policier, where the hero is an unemployed philosopher, who may or may not be a murderer, who befriends his wife's killer, and his neighbour, a detective who sanctions paid homicide and is trapped in a plot where the answer he seeks is himself. Every revelation leads to further obfuscation and instead of the restoration of order is its destruction.

The film plays like a futuristic thriller directed by Bunuel - and if Blier's ultimate timidity means it's never quite as good as that, it's still a remarkable achievement in mainstream, never mind generic, cinema, and very, very funny.

Seriously, Gerard Depardieu has done very little for English language cinema. 1492? My Father The Hero? Green Card? I'll pass, thanks. But with subtitles he's great. This little-known absurdist drama puts him as one of three mismatched men linked by murder and random chance. The films opens at a train station where Depardieu meets a man who is soon dead – possibly by Depardieu's own hand. His wife dismisses it, but is soon dead herself. The police detective upstairs doesn't want to know, he has his own problems. And then the wife's murderer shows up for a chat. Could be a terrible thriller – is a bizarre comedy. The daunting, oppressive cityscapes in the bulk of the film eventually give way to a disconcerting bucolic countryside for the finale, but the surrealism never lets up. Enter this world, and don't expect to leave intact.

I won't go into the plot, it's not important, except to say that it centres on a "friendship" between three men. One may have murdered someone in the subway. One is a probably homicidal detective. And the third murdered the first man's wife. This is a French film, and it's hard to see it working well in any other language or setting. The sudden shift to the countryside is a little jarring, but that would be my only minor criticism of the film.

'Buffet Froid' made in 1979 by Bertrand Blier can be seen as an almost perfect antithesis of the films of the French New Wave that had burst into the cinema world two decades ago. If the New Wave was a Reformation, this film belongs to the Counter-Reformation. Formal simplicity is opposed by abstract sophistication. Lively street scenes are opposed by empty streets at night or lofts transported from New York to the sky-scrappers in the Defense district of Paris. The characters drawn from life are opposed by characters descending from Beckett's or Ionesco's theater. Sincerity is opposed by lack of emotion. Naturalism is opposed by absurd. But, maybe it's all a dream?

The film starts with a ten minute scene that takes place in a Paris subway station. Two characters entertain a dialogue that could be extracted from 'En attendant Godot'. It's about the dreams, or better said the nightmares that haunt one of them (played by Gérard Depardieu). In the dream he is a wanted assassin, followed but never caught by the police. Does the dream start here? Or maybe we are in a dream in the beginning, as Parisians know, the La Defense subway station is never completely empty, not even at night. Further action includes corpses, fast consoled widows, car chases, assassination attempts through music, wine bottles and canned food. Nothing makes too much sense. The characters act like robots that do a lousy job, both socially and emotionally.

The film has an interesting aesthetics, even if too obviously programmatic. Dialogues are fun, even if they seem a little retro nowadays. Existentialism and absurd theater need landmarks to be appreciated and enjoyed all the way. These are missing in this movie, which looks more like an absurd theater show filmed in the '70s. As a spectator I can not fail to appreciate the acting performances of Depardieu, Bernard Blier, and others, but I would have preferred them to be used for better causes.

It takes a special kind of quality to make anything that is bleak and absurd and empty into something that truly holds up without being complete intellectualism/artistic onanism. This film achieves that.

It also takes a special kind of quality to make anything completely remote and arbitrary funny. This film achieves that. It's quite hilarious at times because it's so fresh, and random and unexpected although it's utterly consistent with itself.

Depardieu is awesome as always and more than any other buys into the shenanigans of the concept brilliantly, it's like he's a real life person although his entire character is most perfectly ridiculous and impossible.

There are fine symbolic psychological traits that bring about some kind of aesthetic to the film (Blier's character and his aversion for music). Moreover, the completely barren urban landscapes, seemingly perpetually nocturnal, (that vacant building) and the eerie absence of anyone but the protagonists during any one scene bring this nightmarish facet to the whole which adds to the comic absurdism. It's like they're all alone in their strange old little planet, and it doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest.

Top notch. Also, the pacing and format are just right. At under 1hr30 this is pure efficient cinema that delivers the goods and don't spoil that fine taste from the beginning. Ending is on par with the rest of it. Very well done. Rare quality. 8.5/10.