We concluded our Tavernier mini-season this evening by watching his 2009 In the Electric Mist, starring a peerless Tommy Lee Jones. Like Coup de Torchon, this is also a film about a small-town policeman, played by Lee Jones. And, also like Coup de Torchon, the screenplay is based on an American novel, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, by James Lee Burke. But there, as they say, most of the similarities end. Lee Jones’s detective goes rogue only in the sense that he is determined to get to the bottom of a series of apparently connected murders and is aided by repeated visions of a Confederate General who may or may not be a ghost or part of a recurring dream. Just as Coup de Torchon’s dreamy colonial decadence is enhanced by its West African setting alongside a lazy, inscrutable river, so the steamy, dreamy atmosphere of In the Electric Mist is enhanced by the ever present background of the Louisiana swamplands. For some reason this film never made the big time but, just like Coup de Torchon, it definitely deserves to be better known.
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