Jean-Pierre Melville

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jbeall
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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#26 Post by jbeall » Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:48 pm


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Brian C
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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#27 Post by Brian C » Fri Jun 30, 2017 12:28 am

domino harvey wrote:For most of the running time, I found myself head over heels for Quand tu liras cette lettre (1953). Philippe Lemaire gives one of the great asshole performances as a skeevy lothario who forces himself on women, eventually raping one and driving her to suicide. The subsequent rape revenge is unexpected and diabolical in its own way, and Melville really nails the ultimate punishment for such toxic masculinity. And then…
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I naturally thought that Lemaire was leading Juliette Greco on when he professed his love for her, as it came out of nowhere and would fit well with his character— how else to turn this to his advantage than to flip the tables on the woman who blackmailed him into doing the (horribly unfair to the victim) “right thing”? But then it becomes clear he is sincere, and what’s worse, Greco falls for it. Both arrive on this without the film justifying their about-faces. The film is missing a good ten minutes of narrative necessity to justify these emotional changes, and they are not present in the picture. While this means the film goes off the rails in the last twenty minutes, I did like the ending, with absolutely no one caring about Lemaire’s death— loved the nonchalant hosedown of the train!
Even with this huge caveat, this is still a highly enjoyable film from Melville, and one that deserves a rediscovery when/if it receives an English-friendly release.
Saw this tonight as part of the Melville series at the Gene Siskel Film Center this month, and while I share your issues with the big plot twist, I also find myself feeling like Therese's motives were not really well resolved by the film.
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At the end of the film, when she's giving her vows, she references the failure of her "plan to deliver Max back to Denise" as if that was her intent all along. Was this a wink to the audience, to let us know that we misunderstood her intent in going to take the train to Max? Or was she just in denial about how she felt and how close she was to giving in to her lust for Max?

I don't even know if this is a problem with the film, but as it led to its denouement I was frustrated by how vaguely defined Therese's motives seemed. Maybe watching it again will shed some light on the question? Either way, I'm not so sure she fell for anything ... but she might have, I guess. She's an interesting character, at least.

I agree with you that Max's death was masterful in its pitilessness.
Overall, a strange film. Almost like a Cannes-set reworking of A Streetcar Named Desire. I understand that Melville more or less disowned it later in his career but there's a lot to like about it.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#28 Post by diamonds » Thu Jul 20, 2017 9:40 am

I recently stumbled across a copy of Un Flic online that is vastly different color-wise from the one I saw for the first time. The copy I'm used to watching looks exactly like Beaver's screencaps; it's so oppressively blue that the entire film feels waterlogged. The new copy, however, has much more saturated and realistic color. Here's a brief comparison:

Old screenshot

New screenshot

The quality of the new one is significantly higher as well. I chose this shot to illustrate how stark the difference can be, though it is for the most part still pretty muted. It honestly looks gorgeous, but the color difference is so staggering that it really is like watching a different film. The one soaked in blue takes on a dreamlike quality that seemed to complement the more unhinged narrative. Where could this new copy have been sourced from? It looks nothing like the Beaver caps, and I can't find any info on a new release. (If it helps, the default audio is in German).

Further, it's yet another instance of a push-pull with how blue Melville's films are. The difference between the Criterion and StudioCanal releases of Le Cercle Rouge is pretty slight, but the blu-ray releases of Le Samouraï are pushed way too blue for my liking compared to the Criterion DVD. And now this film is apparently thrown into the fray. We know that Melville liked his color films desaturated, but is there any concrete evidence that he would have gone to these extremes?

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#29 Post by Drucker » Thu Jul 20, 2017 10:13 am

For what it's worth, as I mentioned in the Le Samourai thread after seeing the film on 35mm a few months ago, the film had tons of moments where the blue was heavily pronounced. The BD, if anything, understates just how blue some of these scenes were. Granted, that wasn't a brand new print, but that second screen cap you posted looks nothing like the color timing in Le Samourai. The "oppressively blue" look of the film is accurate.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#30 Post by diamonds » Thu Jul 20, 2017 11:34 am

Yeah, I didn't think this new representation was accurate, but I had a suspicion that the true color intention would lie somewhere in between the two. Good to know about the 35mm print, although I can't imagine the film looking more blue than the blu-ray screencaps.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#31 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:01 pm

Would anyone like me to post my reviews of all thirteen Melville films? It's one of the very very few times that I've both sat through and written about a filmmaker's entire feature output, which is really something I should make more of a habit of doing.

Just to start the ball rolling, here's the first:

Le Silence de la Mer (1949)

If I hadn't known in advance, it would be well-nigh impossible to guess that this was a debut feature, and only Jean-Pierre Melville's second film tout court, after an obscure short from 1945 (which I haven't seen) called Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Clown. Made wholly independently (highly unusual for a French film in the immediate postwar era), and shot entirely on location (ditto) on a tiny budget, it's mostly set in a single country house (owned by Jean Bruller, aka Vercors, the author of the already famous novel on which the film was based), and seems to break all the rules of what constitutes "good" filmmaking, starting with the fact that a huge amount of its spoken content is delivered in voiceover, and two of its three leads hardly speak onscreen. Indeed, the unnamed niece (Nicole Stéphane), despite being visible for much of the running time, ultimately utters just one word.

It's 1941, France is under Nazi occupation, and the niece and her uncle (Jean-Marie Robain) have been ordered to put up a German officer, Werner von Ebrennac (Howard Vernon) for an unspecified period of time. It's an offer that they can't refuse, but they register their protest (and thereby absolve themselves of any possible charge of collaboration with the enemy) by completely blanking him, neither speaking to him nor acknowledging his presence nor even making the most momentary eye contact. A fluent French speaker, von Ebrennac breaks the silence with a series of increasingly elaborate monologues during which he reveals himself to be an intensely sensitive and highly cultured Francophile, the polar opposite of the stereotypical Nazi brute. He sincerely believes that far from representing a conquering force, he's extending a hand of friendship that will ultimately result in France and Germany being joined in perfect harmony. He is, of course, tragically wrong, and quite how wrong he is is laid increasingly bare as the realities of Nazi occupation become impossible to ignore.

Given his near-total inexperience (he'd had no professional training), Melville's control of this material is phenomenally assured - so much so that it's easy to forget that most of the film takes place in a single living room. Henri Decaë's camera is constantly alert to tiny but telling details - the knitting that the niece does to distract herself during von Ebrennac's monologues, the close-up of the German's hands as the uncle muses about how they can be more expressive (and revealing) than the face, the constant changes in lighting depending on the time of day or the intensity of the fire in the grate, the slow zoom in to a portrait of Hitler at a dramatically crucial moment, and so on. Indeed, in its use of close-ups, studied silences and a decidedly essentialist approach to the material, large chunks of the film strongly resemble the work of Robert Bresson, but this is deceptive - Bresson had only made two fairly atypical features by then, and it's more likely that the influence went the other way (certainly, large chunks of Diary of a Country Priest, made the following year, have a very similar tone). The fact that the film was made by a former Resistance fighter further emphasises its underlying moral seriousness - Melville was acutely aware of the complexities of the relationships between the occupiers and occupied, and Le Silence de la Mer expresses them as eloquently as anything else I've seen, with Von Ebrennac fully deserving a position alongside the cinema's other famous "good Germans", Erich von Stroheim's von Rauffenstein (La Grande Illusion) and Anton Walbrook's Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (The Life of Death of Colonel Blimp). Even by the standards later set by Le Samouraï, this is riveting stuff.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#32 Post by swo17 » Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:02 pm

MichaelB wrote:Would anyone like me to post my reviews of all thirteen Melville films?
Yes, please.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#33 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:10 pm

Les Enfants Terribles (1949)

I approached Jean-Pierre Melville’s second feature under two significant misapprehensions - firstly, that it was un film de Jean Cocteau, and secondly, that I’d seen it before. I suspect I’d somehow created an imaginary Cocteau-directed version of the film in my head based on having read his source novel and seen stills, because there are moments here that I couldn’t possibly have forgotten. This is especially true towards the end, a fusion of all-stops-out fatalistic romantic melodrama, dreamlike surrealism and the inexplicably sinister spaces of a Giorgio di Chirico painting complete with enigmatic bust in the foreground, defaced here by a freshly-applied moustache.

The film is a fascinating and surprisingly successful hybrid of two of French cinema's more forcefully original artists. Even though he’s not actually behind the camera (for the most part; he’s said to have directed a couple of scenes), Cocteau’s creative personality is so strong that it almost threatens to overwhelm Melville’s film (his presence is announced from the start, and repeatedly thereafter, thanks to his own florid voice-over narration), and I suspect he rather than Melville was primarily involved with the decision to cast a lead actor who was the living spit of his then lover Jean Marais. This, unfortunately, led to one of the film’s wobblier elements - I wish it had dropped the line that referred to one of the central siblings being sixteen, as leads Edouard Dermithe and Nicole Stéphane were actually in their mid-twenties, and it showed. On the other hand, they’re strikingly convincing as brother and sister: they share a common aura.

Melville does a very impressive job of navigating the novel’s complex psychological themes, including incest and homosexuality, under censorship restrictions that Cocteau wouldn’t have faced as a novelist (in the UK, it was one of the very first films to get an X certificate, reaffirmed in 1976, but since downgraded to a 12). Paul and Elisabeth are devoted siblings who become even closer after the death of their only surviving parent, retreating into their own private space (a bedroom, and later a fetishistic recreation of the same bedroom within the new context of a palatial mansion). There, they play a series of increasingly obsessive games designed to toy with each other’s desires and emotions - and things turn nasty when innocent third parties are involved, be they shop-owners who become the victims of dare-driven shoplifting or, more seriously, people who get romantically involved with either Elisabeth or Paul (whose bisexuality is emphasised by casting the same actress, Renée Cosima, as both his male and female objects of adoration).

The film frequently threatens to go completely off the rails in the final act, a melodramatic tangle of misaddressed letters, misinterpreted signals, Machiavellian manipulation, suicide by poison and overtly symbolic dreams, but somehow Melville and his team manage to bring the whole feverishly overheated concoction to the boil without quite letting it froth over into utter absurdity. (I’m not wholly convinced that Cocteau would have been quite so controlled in Melville’s place!). Cinematographer Henri Decaë pulls off some extraordinary visual effects from the simplest means - notably the reverse-motion shot of Paul sleepwalking backwards, dragging (or rather ‘pushing’) a billowing sheet. Decaë’s work here (and that of production designer Emile Mathys, co-credited with Melville himself) recalls that of Henri Alékan in Cocteau’s own Beauty and the Beast, made three years earlier - both films, incidentally, were made on tiny budgets that did nothing to rein in their imaginative force. The music, too, works brilliantly - using Baroque composers like J.S. Bach and Antonio Vivaldi in a film can often create a deadeningly pseudo-stately effect, but it helps here that neither piece is especially well known: in particular, the repeated use of the Bach Concerto in A minor for 4 keyboards (pianos here) becomes completely hypnotic.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#34 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:12 pm

When You Read This Letter (Quand tu liras cette lettre, 1953)

Jean-Pierre Melville was always pretty dismissive of his third feature - depending on which interview you read, he said that he either did it for the money or to prove that he wasn’t an amateur (his two previous features were entirely independent, self-produced efforts, highly unusual in France at the time). It was a modest popular success - indeed, a significantly bigger hit than the bookending Les Enfants Terribles and Bob le Flambeur - but the critics hated it, in part because they thought Melville was wasting his already amply demonstrated talents on a cheap commercial melodrama.

But even mediocre films by major directors can sometimes be surprisingly engrossing - and When You Read This Letter is at least of passing interest for being the first of Melville’s films to be set not only unambiguously in the (then) present day (I don’t recall Les Enfants Terribles being specifically dated, but it feels more like the 1929 of the novel than the 1949 of the film), but also in an embryonic version of the future Melville universe - I’m especially thinking of the fetishistic close-ups of the obviously American car driven by mechanic-cum-chauffeur Max (Philippe Lemaire), and his fondness for gangster-style trenchcoats and fedoras that would become all too familiar visual ingredients in later Melville films, as would a preference for shooting in highly recognisable locations instead of the studio.

The first half seems to be setting itself up as a conventional love-triangle romance - Max has designs on both Denise (Irène Galter), the orphaned and virginal young stationery-shop worker and the considerably older Irène Fauget (Yvonne Sanson), the rich divorcée holed up at the Hotel Carlton (the film was shot along the Côte d’Azur). But a mid-point twist turns it into much more of a psychological thriller, stirring in rape, more than one robbery, a clearly engineered serious car ‘accident’, a demand for a marriage proposal at gunpoint... whatever its faults, it’s certainly never dull. There are also faint echoes of Les Enfants Terribles in the emotionally knotty relationship between Denise and her older sister Thérèse (Juliette Gréco), a former nun plucked from the convent to look after Denise after their parents’ sudden death, although it’s the unignorable conflict between Thérèse’s upbringing and her natural urges that drives the film’s doom-laden final act.

Although Jacques Deval’s script is pretty rubbishy (significantly, this seems to be the only one of his films that Melville himself didn’t write or co-write), constantly lurching into wild and implausible melodrama and leaving several gaping plot holes (a major character simply disappears from the film after sustaining a non-fatal accident), the staging is peppered with memorable touches: Max’s innate misogyny is depicted by him casually stubbing out a cigarette on a balloon that a showgirl is using to conceal her otherwise bare breasts from him. This really isn’t worth tracking down for any reason other than Melville completism, but I’m glad I’ve seen it.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#35 Post by Brian C » Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:30 pm

swo17 wrote:
MichaelB wrote:Would anyone like me to post my reviews of all thirteen Melville films?
Yes, please.
I too would like to read these. Good stuff so far.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#36 Post by Never Cursed » Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:54 pm

Absolutely!

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#37 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:02 pm

Bob le Flambeur (1956)

Following the creative wobble of When You Read This Letter, Jean-Pierre Melville’s fourth feature saw him scaling new heights. A near-perfect blend of form of content, Bob le Flambeur remains one of his very best films and, along with Le Samouraï a decade later, arguably his most influential. Here, we finally get to visit what is now the familiar Melville universe, in which superbly-chosen French locations are infiltrated by distinctively Transatlantic elements in the form of American cars driven by tersely monosyllabic and stern-faced men in trenchcoats and fedoras, where cops and crooks show mutual respect, all shot in immaculately cool, crisp visuals by the great Henri Decaë and accompanied by a jazz ensemble. Even a non-French speaker watching it without subtitles would probably enjoy it immensely - and might even be able to follow much of it.

The title is often rendered as ‘Bob the Gambler’, but that doesn’t quite catch the metaphor inherent in the use of the verb ‘flamber’, with its suggestion of risking the metaphorical burning of all one’s possessions in a last desperate roll of the dice. Bob (Roger Duchesne) is a silver-haired ex-con, who despite his past as a bank robber is considered harmless by the local police - in fact, Inspector Ledru (Guy Decomble) seems rather protective of him, perhaps because Bob is something of a washed-up sad-sack, but possibly also because of his clear moral scruples: when a pimp seeking his assistance confesses that he beat up his girlfriend, Bob angrily throws him out. But once a gambler, always a gambler, and when the opportunity arises to rob a casino in Deauville, Bob finds it impossible to resist taking it up...

From beginning to end, Melville is clearly having immense fun setting up classic generic situations and then undermining them. It’s not quite as focused on criminal procedure as Kubrick’s The Killing (the films opened three months apart, so are unlikely to have influenced each other in either direction), but we’re still treated to an elaborate plan as to how the heist is going to be pulled off, complete with a session in which a 1:1 scale layout of the casino is marked out in a field in order for the gang to practice its timing (presumably staged more for visual impact than plausibility). As with Kubrick’s film, tiny little things go wrong in practice that trigger a very different outcome to the one anticipated - but whereas in The Killing things simply and inevitably fall apart, Bob le Flambeur leads to a much richer and wittier conclusion than if everything had gone according to plan (the final dialogue exchange is a particular joy).

Melville was more than used to working with low budgets by this stage of his career (of his four features to date, only When You Read This Letter had been shot with conventional resources): unable to afford much studio filming, he and Decaë took their camera (loaded with fast and grainy film stock so as to get away with minimal lighting) out onto the streets of Montmartre and Pigalle, still highly recognisable over half a century later, although dressed with the kind of authentic mid-50s décors that no period drama could possibly match. It was a huge influence on the French New Wave - in particular, you can trace direct links between Bob and Breathless three years later, and not just because Melville appears in the latter - but it’s much more than just a museum piece. In fact, the only French crime thriller of its era that can hold a candle to it is Rififi, released the previous year - they’d make a superb double bill, and apparently Melville’s original screenplay included a verbal reference to Rififi by way of homage, although it didn’t make the final cut.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#38 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:03 pm

Two Men in Manhattan (Deux hommes dans Manhattan, 1959)

Jean-Pierre Melville's fifth feature is a real oddity. The first of his films to be shot outside France (albeit partly: the exteriors are authentic NYC, but the interiors were shot in French studios), it was clearly an intensely personal project - how could it not have been, given the Empire State Building-sized shadow that America casts over much of his other work? - but, like most such films, it's also meandering and indulgent: as writer, producer, director and even star, Melville arguably had rather too much creative freedom without a fully coherent idea of what to do with it. His least commercially successful film by some distance, it was also more or less disowned by its creator – although it’s got more going for it than the wholly commercial melodrama When You Read This Letter.

Elements of a suspense thriller thread themselves throughout the narrative - the two men of the title, journalist Moreau (Melville) and photographer Delmas (Pierre Grasset), are searching for a French UN delegate who missed an important session, and are in turn followed by a mysterious car - but Melville is clearly far more interested in the journey than the outcome. Throughout a long, dark night, with much soul-searching along the way, Moreau and Delmas trawl through various aspects of New York life, from Broadway theatres to sleazy dives (their quarry, Fèvre-Berthier, has a great many girlfriends studded around the city, who conveniently have various archetypal Hollywood-movie professions ranging from actress to jazz singer to hooker), soaking up the atmosphere along with the camera. (You can tell it's a French film: fully topless nudity was strictly verboten in American cinema of the time, and those shots were duly trimmed from the British release).

But the film also indulges in subjects that were clearly dear to Melville - when Fèvre-Berthier is found, his background as a Resistance hero is brought to the fore (Melville was himself active in the Resistance, a subject he tackled directly in Le Silence de la Mer, Léon Morin, Prêtre and Army of Shadows), and the relationship between Moreau and Delmas increasingly revolves around questions of professional ethics: Moreau is more concerned about finding out the truth, Delmas with selling the most sensational possible picture for the highest price, even if it means blatantly rigging setups in a manner a modern tabloid journalist would immediately recognise but which appals the far more gentlemanly Moreau. (The term 'paparazzi' was just months away from entering the media lexicon: Melville's film premiered in October 1959, Fellini's La Dolce Vita the following February).

Part of the film's odd tone stems from Melville's curious casting of himself as Moreau, a brave and somewhat foolhardy decision given that he'd only played minor, often uncredited roles in the past. He's actually not too bad - Moreau comes across as a rather stuffy and stolid figure, qualities that are presumably easier for neophytes to portray – but a leading man he ain’t (and it’s somewhat revealing that he would never play a lead role again), although this might well have been a deliberate tactic to encourage people to spend more time looking at the background, crammed with neon-lit nightscapes that are occasionally a little too obviously back-projected. Some of the other performances are a tad awkward, too, especially in the English-language scenes – Melville’s own performance suggests that he spoke passable English himself, but some of the dialogue delivered by minor supporting performers can be dreadfully clunky. (The film is in a mixture of French and English, whichever is situationally appropriate.)

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Jean-Pierre Melville

#39 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:08 pm

Léon Morin, Priest (Léon Morin, prêtre, 1961)

A classic example of how easy it is to get the wrong end of the stick: I knew in advance that this was the middle film in Jean-Pierre Melville's unofficial Occupation trilogy (the others being Le Silence de la Mer and Army of Shadows) and that it starred Jean-Paul Belmondo, so given those elements and the director and star's other work I naturally assumed that it would be primarily couched as a suspense thriller about a priest who doubles as an underground Resistance fighter.

In fact, it's far richer and subtler than that. While Belmondo gets top billing, befitting his star status, the lion's share of the screen time is occupied by Emmanuelle Riva, whose career recently underwent a multiple award-winning revival thanks to Michael Haneke's Amour. She plays Barny, a widow living in a small town in the French Alps, whose sexual frustration is relieved by fantasising firstly about her (female) boss Sabine, and then about the new priest, Léon Morin (Belmondo), despite both clearly being off limits - although she does begin a relationship of sorts with Morin, who is fascinated by her outspoken atheism and determined to convert her, although this has to be voluntary on her part: fire-and-brimstone threats of hell and damnation don't work on people who don't believe in them.

If it’s likely that Le Silence de la Mer influenced Robert Bresson’s The Diary of a Country Priest, it’s just as plausible that Melville is subsequently repaying the tribute here by making another rare example of a sensitive and intelligent film about the essence of spiritual faith that pointedly doesn’t take sides. It’s very hard to ‘read’ Morin as he responds to Barny’s clumsy attempts at seduction: we know as little about the man beneath the cassock as she does.

Melville apparently wanted to film Béatrice Beck’s novel ever since its publication in 1952, as he thought that it was one of the most convincing evocations of French life under occupation (more specifically, Italian and then German occupation) that he’d ever come across - but it wasn’t until he played a small role in Breathless in 1959 and met Belmondo that he found his star. Belmondo was apparently reluctant, the role of a priest being wildly different from anything that he’d previously tackled. But Melville was specifically after his star quality and the associations people would make with other roles, and his masculine virility is even more pronounced by the fact that most of the supporting characters are children, women or the elderly - the only other men of his age are in German uniform.

Given a decent budget for the first time in his career, and reuniting with Henri Decäe as cinematographer, Melville developed a far more controlled, almost classical visual style for this film: the camera movements are subtle rather than static, but all the focus is on the two main characters as they converse in settings ranging from the confessional to their respective abodes. Although Melville was apparently concerned that a film about a priest would be seen as hopelessly out of date in the post-La dolce vita era, the result was his biggest hit to date, finally beating his debut Le Silence de la mer (which, impressively, had been his box-office champion for a dozen years).
Last edited by MichaelB on Sat Aug 26, 2017 5:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#40 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:15 pm

Le Doulos (1962)

If Bob le Flambeur offered the first visit to the authentic Jean-Pierre Melville universe, Le Doulos is the film in which his mature style was definitively established, from the achingly stylish opening credits sequence that features Maurice (Paul Meurisse), clad in obligatory trenchcoat and fedora, walking in perfect time to the beat of Paul Misraki’s big-band score as the camera tracks alongside him.

Like Bob, he’s spent a fair bit of time in prison, but unlike Bob he has no intention of going straight - indeed, in the opening sequence he kills his former friend Gilbert (René Lefèvre), who betrayed him earlier, and steals the proceeds from a jewellery heist. He then teams up with another colleague, Rémy (Philippe Nahon) to pull off a safecracking job, and for technical reasons is forced to involve Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo), despite the latter’s track record as a police informer (“le doulos” is French slang for an informer). It goes horribly wrong, Rémy and a policeman are killed, and Maurice suspects that Silien was behind it all.

So far so straightforward, but one of the reasons that this film was a key (and acknowledged) influence on Reservoir Dogs (amongst much else) is that Melville constantly pulls the rug out from under audience expectations - most notably via a justly celebrated eleventh-hour monologue by Silien which, with the aid of flashbacks, fills in crucial details that had previously been withheld, forcing us (and the hapless, understandably bewildered Maurice) to reinterpret everything we’ve seen. It’s also - presumably quite deliberately - impossible to tell which of Maurice or Silien is the film’s real protagonist: both men toy with audience sympathy and alienation (in a genuinely shocking early scene, one beats up the other’s girlfriend). Reggiani and Belmondo are both superb, the former crumpled and careworn, the latter distractingly fresh-faced, and there's a delicious cameo from a still thirtysomething Michel Piccoli as a more accomplished (i.e. dapper and self-confident) criminal.

Visually, this was one of Melville’s most accomplished films to date, with almost every shot a marvel of calculatedly contrived noir-like lighting - the shadows are just as expressive as anything casting them, and seemingly everyday locations (a streetlamp surrounded by waste ground) become something weirdly alien. The fact that all the major characters dress more or less identically allows Melville to obscure their identity at key moments, often only revealing it after they’ve performed a dramatically crucial action.

Melville is often cited as one of the supreme masters of the crime genre, so it’s quite surprising to look back on his previous six films and realise that only Bob le Flambeur comes close to fitting that particular pigeonhole, and even that had a rambling, shaggy-dog charm that’s wholly absent here - only Melville’s later films rival Le Doulos for sleek, streamlined singlemindedness. Unlike Bob, which was proudly set in Montmartre and Pigalle, it’s impossible to pin Le Doulos down to specific locations - it’s a Transatlantic never-never land where people dress and behave like Americans, but speak French and whose fatalistic, alienated sensibility is distinctly European. They are all too conscious of their own iconography - when one is shot in the back while facing a mirror, his last gesture is to straighten his hat, which mockingly falls off and rolls away once his lifeless body hits the ground.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#41 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:30 pm

Magnet of Doom (L’ainé des Ferchaux, 1963)

Next to When You Read This Letter a decade earlier, this is Jean-Pierre Melville’s most obscure film - despite the fact that it was filmed in colour and anamorphic widescreen (Franscope), had two major stars in Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charles Vanel, was based on a novel by Georges Simenon, and was shot partly on location in the US (his second and final visit after Two Men in Manhattan). I daresay the title didn’t help much - the English version suggests some kind of sci-fi thriller, while the French (literally, ‘The Oldest Ferchaux’) hints at a family saga, possibly involving the reading of a will.

Melville’s own proposed title, Un jeune homme honourable (‘An Honourable Young Man’) might have been better, because at least it focuses attention on the protagonist Michel Maudet (Belmondo), who after abandoning plans for a boxing career answers an advertisement placed at the behest of wealthy financier Dieudonné Ferchaux (Vanel), and gets the job of secretary-cum-bodyguard - not on merit (Ferchaux openly assumes that Maudet has told him a pack of lies about his previous experience) but on his willingness to be ready to leave the country within half an hour. For Ferchaux is fleeing an arrest warrant, and facing likely extradition from the US - so after withdrawing millions of dollars in cash he and Maudet head south, with Caracas as their intended destination.

So far, so thriller-like - but once the two men leave New York City, the film’s purpose becomes much clearer. Having borrowed extensively from American cinema already, Melville is trying his hand at one of its quintessential genres: the road movie. Although agents are on their tail, the film’s main focus is on the power games played between Maudet and Ferchaux as they head towards New Orleans, which turns out to be their ultimate destination (since they cannot leave the US legally). Vanel’s presence, and the fact that much of the mid-section is set behind the wheel of a vehicle, can’t help but recall Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, although here the tensions are strictly psychological. Ferchaux is rich but ugly and physically weak, Maudet poor but handsome and resourceful - in other words, they have mutual jealousies, and there’s also a pretty strong hint of mutual attraction too, for all Maudet’s eye for the ladies and the presence back in Paris of Ferchaux’s improbable “god-daughters”.

Whereas most of Melville’s other films tauten as they progress, this one visibly relaxes - at one point Henri Decaë’s camera simply saunters around the city, drinking in the local colour, and there are earlier stops to admire such specific sights as Frank Sinatra’s Hoboken birthplace and more general views of Mobil gas stations and Chevrolet bonnets (the latter brand being spelled out in full across the 2.35:1 frame during a conversational scene). As with Two Men in Manhattan, the dialogue is a situationally appropriate mixture of French and English, although neither Belmondo nor Vanel seem especially comfortable with the latter. But in their native tongue, they make a superb double act, enhanced by the fact that they have a striking physical resemblance across the 41-year age gap, thus emphasising the almost father-son bond that develops between them - at least when they’re not warring like a married couple on the verge of a terminal split.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#42 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:33 pm

Le Deuxième Souffle (1966)

After the creative and commercial wobble of Magnet of Doom and a three-year hiatus, Jean-Pierre Melville’s next feature saw him back on top form - in fact, his next four films would all be flat-out masterpieces. At two and a half hours, Le Deuxième Souffle (literally ‘Second Wind’) is his longest film by some distance, but it scarcely feels like it: regular horizontal wipes are constantly hurrying things along.

At base it’s a classic heist thriller, with the heist itself forming a near-wordless mid-point set piece (and a striking change of scenery - it takes place on a mountain road, whereas most of the rest of the film takes place in claustrophobic interiors). But the heist itself unsurprisingly turns out to be the film’s McGuffinesque side issue - Melville’s far more interested in the endlessly intricate and shifting relationships between everyone involved, from direct participants to those with a vested interest. It begins with a prison escape by notorious armed robber Gustave (‘Gu’) Minda (Lino Ventura). Notionally, he’s supposed to lie low until he can be spirited out of the country, but in practice he can’t resist the temptation of getting involved in a daring platinum heist, even if it means negotiating complex and often unspoken underground politics both before and afterwards.

These crooks aren’t exactly gentlemen - killing cops is a predetermined part of their plan - but they do operate according to a particular code of honour, and there are stiff and sometimes fatal penalties for perceived miscreants. By contrast, the police are portrayed as so backstabbingly dishonourable that the film even opens with a lengthy disclaimer about it being a work of fiction, of which this is the most telling extract:
The author of this film (...) wishes to specify that the circumstances, situations and characters of this story have no real basis and that, consequently, there is no question of judging the methods of investigation on the basis of this work of imagination based on a novel.

A scene in which heist participant Paul Ricci (Raymond Pellegrin) is interrogated and effectively tortured by the notoriously brutal Inspector Fardiano (Paul Frankeur) was censored prior to the French release - originally he had water poured down his throat through a funnel, although now that this is left to our imagination we can envisage anything from that to full-on waterboarding.

The casting is first-rate from leads to bit-parts. Ventura, long established as one of French cinema’s subtlest heavies, makes his debut in a Melville film (his second would be his even more memorable lead in Army of the Shadows), and although he and Melville apparently didn’t get on, this isn’t remotely apparent from what’s on screen: there’s a sadness and world-weariness about Gu that makes him Melville’s most sympathetic protagonist since Bob in Bob le Flambeur a decade earlier. Paul Meurisse, best known as the sadistic headmaster in Les Diaboliques, gets the showier role of Inspector Blot, a man whose experience and innate understanding of criminal psychology enables him to second-guess practically every move by crooks and (conveniently amnesiac) witnesses alike.

Visually, it’s even more stripped-down than Le Doulos: quite a few of the compositions almost resemble wireframe renderings, starting with the prison walls in the opening scene and continuing through sparsely-furnished rooms and equally bare exteriors. Melville hadn’t quite arrived at the minimalism (or essentialism) of the following year’s Le Samouraï, but he was clearly well on the way.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#43 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:38 pm

Le Samouraï (1967)

Le Samouraï was the first Jean-Pierre Melville film that I ever saw (sometime in the 1990s, in a new-print revival on the huge screen of the much-missed Lumière Cinema), and for years it was the only one. I’d also seen at least two films that it directly influenced - Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978) and John Woo’s The Killer (1989) with Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) following shortly afterwards - and its indirect reach is vast. Watching it again, in the context of Melville’s entire output in chronological order, I expected it to fit more neatly into his filmography - after all, it has plenty of what are by now clearly recognisable ‘Melvillian’ elements - but instead it seems just as weirdly alien as before: an out-and-out art movie masquerading as a crime thriller.

The biggest departure from the past is that the plot is the least interesting element of the film, and not just because it’s been so extensively reworked over the years. In a nutshell, hitman Jef Costello (Alain Delon), who bases his entire professional philosophy on the concept of the lone, masterless samurai, executes a contract on a nightclub boss, but on leaving his face is clearly seen by the club’s star pianist (Caty Rosier). However, quite unexpectedly, when he’s picked up by the police as part of a sweep of people matching his description, she claims that it wasn’t him, and since his girlfriend Jane Lagrange (Nathalie Delon, the star’s wife at the time) has also provided a false alibi, the police can’t keep him in custody. Once free, Jef has two mysteries to solve: why his former paymasters want him dead, and why the pianist potentially perjured herself on behalf of a man she'd never met before.

Although there were already signs in Le Deuxième Souffle that Melville was systematically stripping out what he deemed to be inessential elements, Le Samouraï goes much further - if it wasn’t for the fact that it predated Stalker by a dozen years, the lengthy, static opening shot of Jef lying on a bed in a dilapidated room with a caged bird tweeting intermittently could almost be described as Tarkovskian. No-one says a word in the first ten minutes, and virtually all the dialogue thereafter is strictly functional, even for conversations between people with some emotional connection (indeed, most characters, including the narratively pivotal pianist, aren’t even named). Buster Keaton might seem like an odd comparison with Delon’s super-cool hitman, but he too maintains an absolute poker face throughout, and expresses far more through the way he walks or straightens his hat than he does through anything he actually says.

This was Melville’s second film in colour (he’d never return to black and white), but his use of it is much more controlled than it was in Magnet of Doom - cinematographer Henri Decaë and production designer François de Lamothe create a world whose palette is dominated by blacks, whites, greys and deep blues, with fleshtones often providing the only significant departure. Once again, trenchcoats and fedoras are much in evidence, although their variety is wittily alluded to during an identity parade (throughout, Melville reveals just enough of a sense of humour to stop the whole meticulously-calibrated edifice from toppling into absurdity). Back in 1967, this must have looked like the last word in hi-tech sophistication as the cops track Jef’s movements on a map of the Métro with illuminated stations, although surely even then there were smaller, more discreet versions of the cigarette-packet sized bug that the authorities plant in his flat? Still, realism is hardly what Melville was after.

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Jean-Pierre Melville

#44 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:46 pm

Army of Shadows (L’Armée des ombres, 1969)

In purely abstract terms, applying Jean-Pierre Melville’s by now fully developed crime-film aesthetic to a WWII Resistance saga makes perfect sense. The narrative ingredients are practically identical, with a group of people plotting assorted “crimes” (at least in the eyes of the occupying authorities) and attempting to carry them out without being arrested or worse. Aside from the fact that the stakes are considerably greater and Melville’s own Resistance history makes the film inescapably more personal, this can easily be read as an entirely natural successor to Le Doulos (1962) and Le Deuxième Souffle (1966) - particularly the latter, as it also stars Lino Ventura - and it’s accordingly been canonised as one of Melville’s greatest films.

But it was a famous critical and commercial flop at the time - although it sold over four times as many tickets as Two Men in Manhattan (1959), it was his least successful film since then, and had been made for a far bigger budget. Left-wing critics excoriated it for its unashamedly pro-Charles de Gaulle stance - understandable in the historical context, but since then de Gaulle had become a hate figure thanks to the events of May 1968, and although he had since retired from frontline politics, he was still alive. (A hypothetical British equivalent, at least until early 2013, would be a thriller about anti-Argentine resistance during the Falklands occupation of 1982, in which Margaret Thatcher would be unambiguously shown as representing the forces of good). The film accordingly took years to travel to English-speaking countries, opening in Britain in 1978 and the US in 2006 (!), although in both cases it received a far more sympathetic reception.

And quite rightly, because once you tune out the background politics that the film itself elides, this is one of Melville’s most masterly achievements. He’d wanted to film Joseph Kessel’s novel ever since he first read it in 1943, a quarter of a century earlier, but he knew that he’d need to muster a hefty budget to do it justice (it ended up as one of the more expensive films made in France up to then), and his own debut feature was still five years away. I suspect he also needed some mental distance from the real-life events that the novel and film depicted - although he’d tackled the Resistance twice before, in Le Silence de la Mer (1949) and Léon Morin, Priest (1961), it was from a more oblique angle, the actual activities of the Resistance either ignored altogether or only briefly alluded to in passing. Here, they couldn’t be more upfront.

In fact, the entire film consists of a series of successive anti-Nazi missions, carried out by a tiny band of activists whose limited numbers are explained by a pivotal early scene in which they have to execute a colleague after discovering that he’s an informer. (The scene in which they discuss how best to execute him cleanly and silently, without alerting the neighbours, nudges black farce). Ruthlessness is their constant guiding principle: a daring attempt at springing a colleague from the Gestapo's clutches has to be called off at almost the last second, condemning him to certain death but sparing other lives - why risk the death of three more people if the odds are that stacked against them? A suicide mission is conducted not merely without the knowledge of colleagues but deliberately leaving them under the impression that its participant is a turncoat: his sacrifice succeeds, but goes unrecognised. Even the missions that go according to plan feel like hollow victories: the gains are small, the next challenge massive and often immediate, and the film concludes with a sombre roll-call of what happened to the few characters left alive at the end - unsurprisingly, given the pervasively fatalistic mood, none of them makes it to VE-Day, and the phrase “he just had time to swallow his cyanide capsule” constitutes a happy ending.

Sadly, this was the last time Lino Ventura starred in a Melville film (the duo’s relationship was apparently so stormy that a substantial chunk of the accompanying documentary on the StudioCanal Blu-ray discusses it in detail), but at least they didn’t fall out before shooting started, as he’s the film’s moral and emotional rock. As in Le Deuxième Souffle, his age (less than a year off his half-century when the film was shot) gives him gravitas: I don’t recall the film mentioning this, but his character Philippe Gerbier is old enough to have adult memories of World War I. His relationship with Simone Signoret, as the colleague he most respects, is particularly well drawn, although when he advises her to destroy the picture of her daughter that she carries with her at all times, they both clearly know that she’ll do no such thing and that this will be a fatal mistake.

Working with Pierre Lhomme as cinematographer this time, Melville maintains Le Samouraï’s visual concept of colours so low-key and restrained that they’re almost monochrome (perhaps appropriately for a film where the threat and practice of torture is ever-present, blacks and blues predominate), allied here to lighting that’s sometimes so daringly crepuscular that I was very grateful for the Blu-ray - it was sometimes very hard to make out details on my old DVD.
Last edited by MichaelB on Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#45 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:49 pm

Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

A downside of watching a highly distinctive director’s entire output in less than a month is that there’s a danger of encountering a sense of déjà vu in a way that wouldn’t have been the case when Le Doulos (1962), Le Deuxième Souffle (1966) and this had four-year gaps between them - and, similarly, I saw Rififi (1955) a lot more recently than fifteen years ago.

To be fair, by any normal yardstick, Le Cercle Rouge is a first-rate thriller - indeed, at the time it was Melville’s biggest hit by a whopping margin (4.3m tickets in France, the next biggest being 1.9m for Le Samouraï), so it’s safe to assume that much of its original audience wouldn’t have been familiar with his earlier work - presumably, they came for the unprecedentedly starry cast (for a Melville film) that included Alain Delon, Yves Montand, Gian Maria Volonté and, significantly against type, André Bourvil, a hugely popular comedy actor who sadly died a month before the film came out and so was unable to parlay his impressively nuanced portrayal of the dogged Inspector Mattei into a parallel career.

Like Le Samouraï, this opens with a bit of Far Eastern philosophy (“Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: "When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever the diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle."), which Melville later confessed to making up - although it casts an effectively portentous shadow over what transpires. The men who unknowingly meet one day are Corey (Delon), a thief recently released from prison, and Vogel (Volonté) who, after successfully fleeing the train in which he was being transported by Mattei, fortuitously climbs into the boot of Corey’s car and discovers a kindred spirit. Naturally, their thoughts turn to a possible professional collaboration, especially when it turns out that Vogel’s old associate Jansen (Montand) has precisely the ballistics skills that a planned jewellery heist requires.

As was then the norm with Melville’s late work, backstory is kept to a minimum, and what there is is often cryptic. For instance, when Corey raids former associate Rico’s safe, he replaces the money and the gun inside it with photographs of his presumed ex-girlfriend, now Rico’s mistress. Similarly, Mattei lives alone with his cats: there’s a photograph of a woman, but we never know who she is or whether she’s even alive. I could have done without the graphic visualisation of Jansen’s alcoholic hallucinations (his flat is invaded by snakes, spiders and other creepy-crawlies), as that’s a horror-film cliché unworthy of a director as fastidious as Melville - he’s on much firmer ground with the philosophical conversations, often between a central character and a peripheral third party, such as Mattei’s head of Internal Affairs (Paul Amiot).

The actual robbery, running about half an hour and played out in near-total silence, isn’t quite up to Rififi’s benchmark (this was almost certainly the conscious inspiration: there’s no doubt that Melville saw it, since he rated it highly enough to include a namecheck in the original screenplay of Bob le Flambeur), but it offers many of the same pleasures, as well as what appears to be one genuinely original idea in the form of the custom-designed bullets with which Jansen shoots out the master lock.

Working once again with cinematographer Henri Decaë, Melville uses a similarly desaturated, near-monochrome colour palette (albeit regularly and deliberately broken up with symbolic splashes of red) and the hyperstylised compositions of Le Samouraï are echoed here too - although with four principal characters and a far more involved narrative it can’t match the earlier film’s ruthless purity. Delon, this time sporting a moustache, gives a similarly inscrutable performance, but Corey isn’t quite as tantalisingly mysterious as Jef Costello - we’re focused more on the game, not the player. The closing scenes, too, feel a tad perfunctory, as though Melville realised that he was approaching Le Deuxième Souffle’s length (at 140 minutes, it’s only ten minutes shorter) and needed to rein it in a bit - but I’m glad I saw the full version: I assume that the 99-minute truncation omits much of what makes late Melville so weirdly fascinating.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#46 Post by MichaelB » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:53 pm

Un Flic (1972)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s last film, known in English as either Dirty Money or the literal translation A Cop, had the advance reputation of being a disappointing ending to a generally spectacular career - and so deflated expectations might well explain why I got more out of it than I was anticipating. It certainly does have problems - although their two previous collaborations Le Samouraï (1967) and Le Cercle Rouge (1970) had struck gold, I’m not convinced that Alain Delon was the best choice to play Superintendent Edouard Coleman, the “flic” after whom the film is named, and there were more dramatic inconsistencies than I’d expect to find in one of Melville’s normally meticulously calibrated thrillers.

That said, its pleasures are often immense. Its virtuoso opening, ranking high amongst Melville’s best set-pieces, sees a bank being robbed at an off-season resort just before closing time, the exterior shots marked by fog and spray (there’s no music: just the sound of crashing waves and occasional gunfire and alarms), the plan upset by one single element not coming off as intended. An even more elaborate mid-point sequence is worthy of Hitchcock (dodgy model work and all) in which Richard Crenna’s suave criminal mastermind Simon transfers from a helicopter to a train, steals two suitcases from one of the passengers, and then performs the same manoeuvre in reverse - all staged in what appears to be real time, including a lengthy scene in the carriage toilet in which he strips off his weather-protective coveralls to reveal a natty dressing gown, as though he was a fellow sleeping-car denizen out for a midnight cigarette. (I’m guessing that that wasn’t Crenna’s voice on the soundtrack - there’s no trace of an accent - but the lip-sync is close enough to suggest that he was actually speaking French on camera).

Simon represents one point of the film’s central triangular relationship, the others being his femme fatale wife Cathy (Catherine Deneuve, oddly under-used despite her co-star billing) and Coleman, with whom she is having an affair. But there’s a more interesting triangle going on between Cathy, Coleman and Gaby, a transvestite prostitute with a passing physical resemblance to Cathy, and whose gender is rendered even more ambiguous by the casting of actress Valérie Wilson. Given that most of Melville’s films revolve around male bonding of some kind, overt homosexuality has been conspicuous by its absence - Les Enfants Terribles (1949) is the major exception (although Jean Cocteau must undoubtedly take the credit for that). But an early, seemingly throwaway scene in which Coleman issues a verbal warning to a teenage rent boy reveals an unexpected sense of complicity, which gives his subsequent scenes with Gaby an almost erotic charge - when he ultimately beats “her” up over an alleged betrayal, it’s almost as though he’s playing the cuckolded husband.

But this is where the combination of Delon’s casting and Melville’s perennial reluctance to offer much in the way of backstory or psychological motivation undermines the film. While Delon's expressionless inscrutability was an asset to the earlier films, it's much less effective here, especially as the occasional snippets of first-person voiceover encourage us to empathise with him instead of the more charismatic Simon (and of course in all of Melville’s other crime dramas, it’s the criminal who’s the protagonist). While Melville’s aesthetic control is as steely as ever (the emphasis on blue anticipates Michael Mann’s work), but it’s sadly impossible to say whether Un Flic heralded a change of emphasis in future films that would in retrospect make his strategy clearer. Melville never intended it to be his final film (he was preparing a new thriller with Yves Montand when he died of a heart attack in 1973, aged just 55) but that’s how it turned out.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#47 Post by zedz » Thu Aug 24, 2017 10:09 pm

MichaelB wrote:Would anyone like me to post my reviews of all thirteen Melville films? It's one of the very very few times that I've both sat through and written about a filmmaker's entire feature output, which is really something I should make more of a habit of doing.

Just to start the ball rolling, here's the first:

Le Silence de la Mer (1949)

If I hadn't known in advance, it would be well-nigh impossible to guess that this was a debut feature, and only Jean-Pierre Melville's second film tout court, after an obscure short from 1945 (which I haven't seen) called Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Clown. Made wholly independently (highly unusual for a French film in the immediate postwar era), and shot entirely on location (ditto) on a tiny budget, it's mostly set in a single country house (owned by Jean Bruller, aka Vercors, the author of the already famous novel on which the film was based), and seems to break all the rules of what constitutes "good" filmmaking, starting with the fact that a huge amount of its spoken content is delivered in voiceover, and two of its three leads hardly speak onscreen. Indeed, the unnamed niece (Nicole Stéphane), despite being visible for much of the running time, ultimately utters just one word.

It's 1941, France is under Nazi occupation, and the niece and her uncle (Jean-Marie Robain) have been ordered to put up a German officer, Werner von Ebrennac (Howard Vernon) for an unspecified period of time. It's an offer that they can't refuse, but they register their protest (and thereby absolve themselves of any possible charge of collaboration with the enemy) by completely blanking him, neither speaking to him nor acknowledging his presence nor even making the most momentary eye contact. A fluent French speaker, von Ebrennac breaks the silence with a series of increasingly elaborate monologues during which he reveals himself to be an intensely sensitive and highly cultured Francophile, the polar opposite of the stereotypical Nazi brute. He sincerely believes that far from representing a conquering force, he's extending a hand of friendship that will ultimately result in France and Germany being joined in perfect harmony. He is, of course, tragically wrong, and quite how wrong he is is laid increasingly bare as the realities of Nazi occupation become impossible to ignore.

Given his near-total inexperience (he'd had no professional training), Melville's control of this material is phenomenally assured - so much so that it's easy to forget that most of the film takes place in a single living room. Henri Decaë's camera is constantly alert to tiny but telling details - the knitting that the niece does to distract herself during von Ebrennac's monologues, the close-up of the German's hands as the uncle muses about how they can be more expressive (and revealing) than the face, the constant changes in lighting depending on the time of day or the intensity of the fire in the grate, the slow zoom in to a portrait of Hitler at a dramatically crucial moment, and so on. Indeed, in its use of close-ups, studied silences and a decidedly essentialist approach to the material, large chunks of the film strongly resemble the work of Robert Bresson, but this is deceptive - Bresson had only made two fairly atypical features by then, and it's more likely that the influence went the other way (certainly, large chunks of Diary of a Country Priest, made the following year, have a very similar tone). The fact that the film was made by a former Resistance fighter further emphasises its underlying moral seriousness - Melville was acutely aware of the complexities of the relationships between the occupiers and occupied, and Le Silence de la Mer expresses them as eloquently as anything else I've seen, with Von Ebrennac fully deserving a position alongside the cinema's other famous "good Germans", Erich von Stroheim's von Rauffenstein (La Grande Illusion) and Anton Walbrook's Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (The Life of Death of Colonel Blimp). Even by the standards later set by Le Samouraï, this is riveting stuff.
Great assessment of a great film. When I first saw it I immediately thought of Bresson and was startled when I checked the dates of their respective movies. With these earliest Melville films, I think what we're seeing is an intelligent director who's extraordinarily in tune with his material, and tailoring his style to the needs of the authors he's collaborating with, which I think is why it's so easy to misread Les Enfants terribles as a Cocteau film. Although it's a film that's completely in tune with Cocteau's authorial signature, as a piece of filmmaking in my opinion it's quite different to anything that Cocteau directed (despite its various Cocteauvian visual flourishes).

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#48 Post by fiddlesticks » Thu Aug 24, 2017 10:24 pm

Bravo!

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#49 Post by matrixschmatrix » Thu Aug 24, 2017 10:53 pm

zedz wrote: Great assessment of a great film. When I first saw it I immediately thought of Bresson and was startled when I checked the dates of their respective movies. With these earliest Melville films, I think what we're seeing is an intelligent director who's extraordinarily in tune with his material, and tailoring his style to the needs of the authors he's collaborating with, which I think is why it's so easy to misread Les Enfants terribles as a Cocteau film. Although it's a film that's completely in tune with Cocteau's authorial signature, as a piece of filmmaking in my opinion it's quite different to anything that Cocteau directed (despite its various Cocteauvian visual flourishes).
It is interesting, and startling, how much Meville's early work doesn't seem immediately Melvillian (though Bob le Flambeur is an exception- here an in Les Enfants Terribles in particular, there's a sense of his skill (both are phenomenal movies) but not necessarily of the particular personality that would come totally to define his later work. Neither feels anonymous, and I agree that Les Enfants doesn't feel precisely like something Cocteau had directed, but apart from certain elements that would recur- the hushed intensity of Silence, for example- I would be hard pressed to guess that either was Melville if I didn't know it going in.

You could read into this a certain ossification in Melville's late period, since his last few movies become nigh obsessive in their focus on a few key ideas and themes- honor among thieves, skilled men doing skilled work in dead silence, a sort of inhuman cool- but it feels more like a narrowing in, a sense that Melville was becoming a minimalist and seeing how much he could do with a deliberately limited palette. His influences still echo, though- I think Bresson still resonates in Army of Shadows, which has some elements of A Man Escaped, occupation as this existentialist hell, only with Melville forcing his hero to repeat the miraculous escape over and over until finally he and his comrades are destroyed by the struggle.

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Re: Jean-Pierre Melville

#50 Post by Brian C » Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:56 am

I'm extremely resistant to the idea of picking a favorite film, but if forced, I'd probably pick Army of Shadows. I watch it on a fairly regular basis, having thankfully picked up the Criterion Blu on Day 1 of its existance, and I'm pretty sure I watched it most recently earlier this year. It's a perfect blend of technical skill, compelling narrative, thematic depth, interesting characters, fine acting, etc. - superb in all the ways that make a movie a good movie on the surface level.

But, no doubt due to Melville's personal history, it also has a sense of lived-in experiential wisdom. It's not just a film about the people of the Resistance, it's a film that's very deeply about what it's like to be part of the Resistance. It's a movie that makes me take stock of myself, and wonder how I would react if I found myself in circumstances like that. Yet at the same time, it carries no hint that the courage needed to serve is in some way more noble or otherwise morally superior to the other people, living their day-to-day lives the best they can; I think specifically of the barber briefly played by Serge Reggiani, who as far as we know is just a guy going about keeping his head down, but the film makes a point that for all we know decent people everywhere were doing what they could in small but valuable ways.

In fact, the film seems very ambivalently clear-eyed about these characters and why they do what they do. They have no hope of personal reward, or of materially affecting the outcome of the war, or even to stay alive until the end of it. They do what they do out of either a sense of moral principle or, more likely, just an intellectual obligation more than any overriding patriotic sense. Their sacrifices are small, perhaps pointless, perhaps even counterproductive in ways. The film doesn't even bother to show a meaningful mission: some radio equipment is smuggled here and there, bigwigs are ferried out of the country only to attend inconsequential meetings in London, etc ... busy work, essentially. An important rescue mission needs to be aborted, another successful rescue mission results in the rescued man being put into seclusion and out of action, no more helpful to the cause than if he was dead. And yet they trudge on, grim and determined; they are part of the Resistance, so they must do what they can to Resist.

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