Usually the heist or robbery doesn’t arrive until the climax, and it unfolds after-hours in near silence in the city. In Jean-Pierre Melville’s A Cop, the bank robbery in a western French coastal town opens the film in waning daylight as a storm rages. Inside the bank, robbers don sunglasses as the crashing sound of sea outdoors distracts our attention, making the robbers seem all that more alien in their concentration. One of them, wounded, will be dispatched in hospital by his compatriots, through the agency of their leader Simon’s girlfriend, Cathy, dressed as a nurse: an image of mercy committing cold-blooded murder. Cathy is also in bed with Edouard, the Parisian police chief. At one point Edouard also dons sunglasses. He is brutal, cynical; he brusquely beats the arrested and holds in complicated bondage a transvestite informant who aches for freedom. The world is morally ambiguous, and Coleman’s coldness and cruelty recall both authorities and the underground Resistance during the Occupation.
Many decry that Melville’s last film wasn’t one of his masterpieces; but it’s a summary work that closes a phenomenal body of work.
Alain Delon is brilliant as Edouard, a man so coolly monstrous that when he opens a bathroom door to apprehend a criminal he instantly closes it to give the man a second longer to complete his suicide, thus saving the state (and himself) time and trouble. Needless to say, his motives are muddied when he finally has his quick-trigger showdown in the street with Simon as Cathy watches. Simon, it turns out, is unarmed: murder passing for suicide, and suicide masking police business-as-usual. But Simon’s motive in inviting death is to protect Cathy; before he takes to the street, Simon is shown against the Arc de Triomphe outside his window.
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Tags: Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Melville
This entry was posted on September 26, 2007 at 2:55 am and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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UN FLIC (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)
Usually the heist or robbery doesn’t arrive until the climax, and it unfolds after-hours in near silence in the city. In Jean-Pierre Melville’s A Cop, the bank robbery in a western French coastal town opens the film in waning daylight as a storm rages. Inside the bank, robbers don sunglasses as the crashing sound of sea outdoors distracts our attention, making the robbers seem all that more alien in their concentration. One of them, wounded, will be dispatched in hospital by his compatriots, through the agency of their leader Simon’s girlfriend, Cathy, dressed as a nurse: an image of mercy committing cold-blooded murder. Cathy is also in bed with Edouard, the Parisian police chief. At one point Edouard also dons sunglasses. He is brutal, cynical; he brusquely beats the arrested and holds in complicated bondage a transvestite informant who aches for freedom. The world is morally ambiguous, and Coleman’s coldness and cruelty recall both authorities and the underground Resistance during the Occupation.
Many decry that Melville’s last film wasn’t one of his masterpieces; but it’s a summary work that closes a phenomenal body of work.
Alain Delon is brilliant as Edouard, a man so coolly monstrous that when he opens a bathroom door to apprehend a criminal he instantly closes it to give the man a second longer to complete his suicide, thus saving the state (and himself) time and trouble. Needless to say, his motives are muddied when he finally has his quick-trigger showdown in the street with Simon as Cathy watches. Simon, it turns out, is unarmed: murder passing for suicide, and suicide masking police business-as-usual. But Simon’s motive in inviting death is to protect Cathy; before he takes to the street, Simon is shown against the Arc de Triomphe outside his window.
Like this:
Tags: Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Melville
This entry was posted on September 26, 2007 at 2:55 am and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.