Buffet Froid (1979) on Netflix
At La Défense station, Alphonse Tram offers an accountant his bloodstained knife. It vanishes, and Tram tells his neighbor, Inspector Morvandieu, about the man he found in a metro tunnel.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Alphonse Tram is an unemployed dreamer who lives in a nearly deserted condominium. Late one night at La Défense station he falls into conversation with an accountant heading home, a man of conventional views who grows uneasy at the stranger's rambling. Tram tries to press on him a bloodstained knife, saying he wants to lessen the chance of doing something silly. The accountant sets the knife down behind them; when the two look again it is gone. Hours later Tram comes upon the same man lying in a tunnel from another metro station with that knife in his stomach. Inspector Morvandieu, his new neighbor, is off duty, wants no part of a complex case, and pushes Tram out of his flat.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Buffet Froid (1979)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The metro-station scene where Alphonse finds the accountant with a knife in his stomach was first shot with actor Jacques Rispal, but Blier felt it didn't work; he brought in Michel Serrault, uncredited, to spend two evenings at the end of shooting remaking the scene with Gérard Depardieu.
- After winning the 1977 Oscar for Best Foreign Film for Préparez vos mouchoirs, Bertrand Blier turned down all the US offers that followed, but used the win to help finance Buffet froid, saying: "Without that statuette, the project would perhaps have been a non-starter".
- Bertrand Blier said he wrote the scenario of Buffet froid in only two weeks, one of the fastest he had put together, drawing on a recurring dream in which he was pursued by the police, as his character Alphonse is in the film.
