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.
Posts Tagged ‘Jean-Pierre Melville’
UN FLIC (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)
September 26, 2007THE RED CIRCLE (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970)
September 22, 2007This may be Jean-Pierre Melville’s most concentrated film, and it is certainly so during the jewel heist and its tragic aftermath. Le cercle rouge is about Paris, loyalty, and evil so bone-deep it is scarcely recognized as such by the one toting it: Le Commissaire Mattei, who believes he is simply doing his job in tracking down the thieves, but who uses wiles and deceit to engineer the outcome, the deaths of all three, along with the unintended collapse of a sixteen-year-old boy, who may or may not survive (pointedly, hauntingly we never find out), but who proved useful along the way to pressure information from his father. Of course, Hannah Arendt had something historical in mind when she coined the phrase “the banality of evil”; but Mattei’s workday procedure approaches demonstration of just that when we consider that Melville’s Mattei recalls wartime collaborationists and his thieves the Resistance. To the extent that Mattei, after all, represents law and order and the thieves a concerted violation of that, we feel a twinge of moral ambiguity, as befits Melville’s cinema, life, and historical memory. Mattei’s fondness for dogs and cats may be interpreted as a humanizing touch; it may also be a solitudinous outlet for the monstrous inhumanity directing him. Hitler, too, was fond of his pets.
The boy who is rushed from police headquarters to hospital: we don’t forget him—and neither can Melville, who has dressed his feet in startlingly red socks.
Alain Delon is Corey, whose departure from prison at the outset ensures his lethal outcome; Gian Maria Volontè is Vogel, whose escape from Mattei’s custody at the outset ensures his outcome, which at the last he seals by heading into the circle of danger to protect Corey. Both actors are excellent.
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SECOND BREATH (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966)
September 19, 2007From the novel Un reglement de comptes, by José Giovanni, Le deuxième souffle is among Jean-Pierre Melville’s most morally complex and visually captivating works. The film opens as gangster Gustave (“Gu”) Minda and another inmate escape from prison, thus winning a “second breath” of freedom. An overhead shot, because of the design of the prison roof, entombs upright officials in an enormous coffin-like space, suggesting a limit to all breath and “second breaths.” The two escapees jump a train, but the younger man, who jumps off for his destination, ends up a suicide when cornered by the law intent on sending him back to prison. This could have been Gu, whose pilgrim’s progress during his “second breath” the film follows.
Gu commits acts of both kindness and vicious mayhem; occasionally it’s the same act. Moreover, the film’s secondary main figure, Commissaire Blot, descends into his own moral murkiness in his conniving determination to catch Minda, and he must contend with Inspector Fardiano as vigilantly as he must with Minda, as indeed Minda must contend with fellow gangsters. In the end, Minda is destroyed by his having been tricked into giving up a name to the police following a highway murder-robbery in which he participated out of financial necessity, thus clouding his reputation, making him appear a dishonorable stoolie—the facsimile of a collaborationist at the time of the Occupation during the war.
Cold, clear-eyed, exceptionally brutal, Melville’s black-and-white Second Breath boxes viewers in a mental coffin, steeping them in an intricate mortal world of cops and criminals. Not for the first or last time in Melville, the drop of a hat off a shot-dead man’s head releases a poignant reminder of our ultimate vulnerability.
As Minda and Blot, Lino Ventura and Paul Meurisse are excellent.
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TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1958)
September 18, 2007Written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, who also took the lead role of a sanctimonious journalist, Deux hommes dans Manhattan is a procedural. Two men, journalist Moreau and photographer Delmas, investigate the disappearance of France’s ambassador to the U.N. Their nocturnal search takes them throughout the electric city and into “darkest Brooklyn”—a reference that always cracks me up. Two Men looks back to a number of films, including two noirs by Jules Dassin, The Naked City (1948) and the London-set Night and the City (1950), and with its complex tone—a mix of journalistic objectivity, spooky mystery skirting luridness, macabre comedy—and tortured lonely lives, it looks ahead to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).
It turns out that a heart attack killed the French diplomat in his mistress’s apartment. His daughter shadows the investigative pair while her mother, the one most in the dark, waits for some word from her spouse. For her, it’s another one of those nights.
The dead man had been a true hero of the Resistance. A quarrel ensues as to how to treat the “story”—sensationally, which will mean big bucks, or tactfully, which is to say, deceptively. Melville knows his Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948); Moreau and Moreau’s boss insist on “printing the legend.” Delmas, a cynic and the one struggling hardest to make a living, is slower to come around.
At one level, the two men are warring aspects of a similar job description; at another, they are both differently wrong. One adheres to the past; the other must cope with the present.
Widely regarded as one of his failures, even by Melville, this is actually one of his most brilliant, most moving works—and the black-and-white cinematography, by Nicolas Hayer and Melville himself, is peerless.
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LE SAMOURAI (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)
September 29, 2007Alain Delon claimed his most melancholy role, and a brutal one, as hitman Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s electrifying Le samouraï. Jef doesn’t make mistakes; his careful arrangement of details, including alibis, makes him arrest-proof. But his murder of a nightclub owner generates unaccustomed eyewitnesses, one of whom, the club singer, got a good look. After the police take him in, and let him go because the woman insists he is not the killer, he becomes a target for both the police and the one who had hired him.
Jef has little life apart from work. He lives in a spare, small apartment with one companion: a caged bird. This pet possesses a joyless, one-note chirp, but he or she is the essence of loyalty. When Jef returns after his place has been bugged, the animal’s agitation alerts him that something is amiss. The bird, at first little more than his or her sound, initially seems a projection of Jef’s solitude and forlorn, vampire-like existence; as the film progresses we wonder whether this companion, along with Jef’s loyal girlfriend, is all that keeps Jef sane; and at the end, when Jef meets a heart-piercing end that reveals his capacity for loyalty, we worry about the bird, who has now lost his or her one friend.
Delon is superb; but equally brilliant is François Périer, who plays the police inspector determined to bring Jef down. Both fatalistic and sadistic, as remorseless as Jef, and fleetingly human, compassionate, this cop believes that the end justifies the means.
“What sort of man are you?” the singer asks Jef when he tells her that he killed the club owner, whom he didn’t know, for money.
”Why, Jef?” she asks when he turns his gun on her.
But wait!
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Tags:Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Melville
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