Pile ou face

The nagging, shrewish Madame Morlaix meets her death by defenestration. L' Inspecteur Baroni suspects her timid, henpecked husband and proceeds to hound him relentlessly.....

This is the third collaboration between director Robert Enrico and actor Philippe Noiret and while it does not have the intensity of 'Le Secret' nor the visceral power of 'Le vieux Fusil' it offers us an ambiguous and disturbing relationship between Noiret's cynical Baroni and the pitiful Morlaix of Michel Serrault, whose characters turn out to have more in common than would seem apparent.

The setting of this adaptation from a novel by Alfred Harris has been transposed from Southern California to Bordeaux and Enrico with his cameraman Didier Tarot have made that city an active participant in the plot. For those interested in trivia, the island of Talua where Morlaix dreams of going is actually fictional and featured in Mervyn LeRoy's earlier 'Devil at four o'clock' whilst the film's title which translates as 'Heads or Tails' is inspired by the name of producer Georges Cravenne's dog.

Enrico and his adaptors have captured the psychological complexity of this material which has distinct echoes of Georges Simenon and in Noiret and Serrault we have two superlative artistes who enrich any film in which they appear. The film is slightly weakened however by a badly delineated parallel plot concerning drug trafficking and a murdered transvestite which robs it of focus.

Should any proof be required that additional dialogue is by Michel Audiard we have Baroni's observation that "Justice is like the Blessed Virgin. If we don't see her from time to time, doubt sets in."