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In the Swim
Stunning imagery and an elegantly simple story propel Whale Rider.
-Cindy Fuchs

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

New Shorts

Continuing Shorts

Repertory Film

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June 19-25, 2003

movies

Around and About

Deadeye dick: Yves Montand as <i>Le Cerle Rouge</ i>s ex-cop marksman.

Deadeye dick: Yves Montand as Le Cerle Rouge’s ex-cop marksman.

A lost noir treasure finally sees the light of day.

by Sam Adams

A close cousin to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1968), Melville’s 1970 Le Cercle Rouge adopts the same implacable pace, stretching to two hours and 20 minutes its almost schematic tale of two strangers who meet by chance and plan a jewelry store heist. Considering that it was Melville’s biggest European hit, and that such directors as Quentin Tarantino and John Woo have cited Melville as a key influence, it’s fairly astonishing that Cercle has never been seen in the U.S. at its full length until now.

Saying that Tarantino and Woo (under whose aegis this reissue arrives) are fans gives precisely the wrong impression of Melville, whose laconic, almost silent style couldn't be further from the former's chatty lowlifes or the latter's elaborately choreographed violence. Melville's heroes are the opposite of self-conscious; in Le Cercle Rouge as well as Le Samouraï, Alain Delon seems to act without thinking -- not rashly, but instinctively -- and Henri Decaë's camera is unfailingly matter-of-fact. When Delon's Corey is released from prison, his first stop is the apartment of an old underworld acquaintance, whom he proceeds to rob using little more than force of will as a weapon. When two of the thug's goons catch up with Corey in a deserted pool hall, it's no more than a matter of seconds before he's killed one and disarmed the other, all in one fluid motion. The embodiment of existentialism, Corey is exactly as he does.

For Melville, the crime movie is merely a vessel, a lesson learned eagerly by disciples from Jean-Luc Godard (who repaid the debt with a cameo in Breathless) to Neil Jordan, whose The Good Thief, a remake of Melville's Bob le Flambeur, succeeded perhaps too well in being only about itself. In the case of Le Cercle Rouge, Melville uses Corey's chance union with escaped prisoner Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) as the opportunity for a meditation on the relationship between destiny and guilt.

The (apparently apocryphal) Ramakrishna quote that opens the movie invokes a sense of ineluctable fate, also suggested in its methodically relentless pace. The intercutting of Corey and Vogel's paths, the one reestablishing his life after a stay in prison, the other an escaped fugitive on the run, makes it inevitable that they'll intersect, with Melville neatly eliding the difference between genre logic and deterministic fate. As in Le Samouraï, Melville rarely uses music and goes long stretches without dialogue or even much in the way of sound effects, creating (at least in front of a respectful audience) a breathless sense of tension and a focus on the minute details. As Vogel attempts to pick the handcuffs that bind him to a sleeper car bed without waking the policeman in the bunk below, you can hear every creak in the bedsprings. The climactic, near-silent heist, which riffs on a similar sequence in Jules Dassin's Rififi (which Melville was originally slated to direct), is even more tightly wound, though the effect here is less Dassin's police-blotter realism than a quasi-mythic test of skill. Yves Montand's sharpshooter, an alcoholic ex-cop who's kicked the sauce to steady his hands, knocks out the alarm with the crucial shot, then removes a flask from his jacket, but instead of taking a fatal swig, he merely inhales its heady perfume and puts it away: He's proved his mettle, killed all his demons with a single bullet.

Though Melville's pacing suggests a Kubrickian chill, Melville finds room in his sweeping narrative for small, incidentally human moments. In an ordinary cops-and-robbers tale, it would seem like an interruption to follow the detective home and watch him feed his cats (let alone for it to happen twice), but it's precisely because such moments don't feel extraneous that you begin to realize that Melville has somehow managed to reconstruct the crime movie with character, not crime, at its center. Captain Mattei (André Bourvil) is portentously warned by his chief of police that "all men are guilty" (we later see him paging through Mattei's file in a spare moment), but rather than a gloss on original sin or the Napoleonic code, Melville means the statement to be liberating. If we all die guilty, then we need only worry about how we live. It's a particularly rugged, solitary code -- it's worth noting that in this manliest of men's movies, there's not a single line spoken by a woman -- but it's no more uncompromising or stark than the movie itself.

Le Cercle Rouge

Written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville A Rialto Pictures release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

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