Seminal doom
Written: May 23 '03 (Updated May 23 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: the mythoi of Melville, Montand, Delon
Cons: 140 minutes is a long time (though I was never bored)
The Bottom Line: 4 1/2 stars, but not for everyone
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| Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) |
Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 "Le samourai" starring Alain Delon is one of my favorite movies. It turns out that it is John Woo's favorite one, and Woo arranged for the first American release of the full 140-minutes of Melville's 1970 "Le cercle rouge" (Red Circle) also starring Delon. Melville's austere, slow-paced "thrillers" (including "Bob, le flambeur with Roger Duchesne. "Le Doulous" with Jean-Paul Belmondo and "Un flic" again with Delon) have been much admired, first by the nouvelle vogue film critics turned directors (Godard and Truffaut) and later by such directors as Martin Scorcese, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, Wong Kar-wai, Johnny To, and John Woo.
As this list of admirers suggests, Melville's films show a world of tough males of cops, robbers, and hit-men. Women barely count as distractions, though in "Le samourai" Nathalie Delon distracts and thereby leads to the destruction of Alain Delon's "samurai" hit-man. There is a scene of female nudity, several scenes of female dancers in a night-club, and a scene in which the night-club's flower seller gives Delon a rose, but I do not recall a single line being uttered by a woman in Le cercle rouge." None of the four main characters (a police inspector, an ex-policeman ace marksman, an escaped crime suspect, and a thief just released from prisoners) has any visible relationship with a woman, and it is a surprise to find that the night-club owner has a son. The police inspector has three cats.
The men have each other? Well, they rely on each other. Loyalty and professionalism are their visible values, though they do not expect loyalty from each other. Corey (Delon) has just met the two men, the fugitive Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) and the ex-cop Jansen (Yves Montand) with whom he pulls a heist suggested to him in the film's first scene by a prison guard commander.
Before the three get together on a very intricate job, we see Vogel's escape from a train and his police escort police Commissaire Mattei (André Bourvil) and a very large-scale manhunt with dogs and legions of policemen. Corey's release from prison, visit to a gangster he protected when he took the rap for a job, and encounter with two goons sent after him. Then Vogel hides in the trunk of the car Corey bought, doesn't shoot Corey—who coolly throws him a pack of cigarettes and his lighter—, gets back in the trunk, emerges again from the trunk at a crucial time for Corey, and in Corey's Paris apartment (where, amazingly, none of the gangsters seeking him look!) agrees to work with Corey on the jewelry-store robbery. They need an ace marksman and Vogel knows a former cop, Jansen, who was one.
It is more than an hour into the movie when the audience first sees Jansen. And what an introduction it is! He is in the throes of the D.T.s and what he hallucinates the audience sees. Having a job to do sobers him up. An hour and a half into the movie, the job begins. There is no background music, but the moves are very carefully choreographed. Other than being shot in (fairly muted) colors, the job is filmed as austerely as in a Bresson film.
I don't like heist movies. At least this one does not have the cliché that I think Melville invented (for "Bob, la flambeur") of one last job before retiring (The Score, The Heist, etc.). I tend to admire professional competence in anything, but resent being drawn into identifying with thieves (even more than being drawn into identifying with hit men...). I guess that somehow the Robin Hood legend did not take for me as a child. Nevertheless, the heist herein is an interesting challenge and rivals the ones in Jules Dassin's films.
I'm more interested in the hunt. Commissioner Mattei is not a particularly sympathetic figure. (Maybe he is to cat fanciers.) He is another professional who is good at his job of tracking down criminals. (Escorting them across the country, he's not as good at.) Hard as he is, the head of police internal affairs (Le directeur de la P.J, played by René Berthier) makes him seem soft-hearted for considering that a suspect might be innocent, telling Mattei "All men are guilty. They’re born innocent, but it doesn’t last. We all change for the worse."
It being a Melville film, doom is certain. The only question is "How?" And, as influenced as Melville was by the vision of male camaraderie in Howard Hawks, Melville does not deliver beautiful heroic deaths to the fatalistic heroes. He does include a very Hawksian redemption, Jansen's, from a frequent Hawksian malady, alcoholism, "for the team," however ad hoc a team (think Dean Martin in "Rio Bravo" and Robert Mitchum in "El Dorado").
The incidents of violence are quick flashes, not the slow-motion ballets of violence in Peckinpagh or various admirers of Melville and/or Peckinpagh. For a "thriller," the pace of "Le cercle rouge" is remarkably slow. The wintry backdrop is bleak, too. I wasn't bored (though I might have cut some of the dances and Mattei's two cat-feedings) and thought that the action scenes were superbly done.
Delon with a very 1970s mustache and sideburns says very little. As in "Le samourai," he is inscrutable. He aged a lot in the decade since he had burst on the scene with the leading roles in "Purple Noon" and "Rocco and His Brothers" and had transformed from the somewhat gawky Tom Ripley in the former to the ultra-cool criminal of "Le samourai" and this film.
Gian Maria Volonté (El Indio in "A Few Dollars More," the writer Carlo Levi in "Christ Stopped at Eboli) is also much of a cipher. The audience never learns what the crime for which he was arrested was. He's the character who is easiest to identify with, being the most spontaneous. Plus, it's hard not to sympathize with the prey of so many hunters.
Yves Montand was a pretty cool dude, too (Wages of Fear, Z, etc.). It's all the better when it's bluff. As Jansen he is credible as a drunk and just right as the drunk recovering his skills and literally going along with Corey. Most of his backstory is invisible, too.
I've already noted that André Bourvil is not particularly especially sympathetic. I also have difficulty crediting that he would have gone along in transporting a suspect from Paris to Marseilles and be involved in robbery and murder investigations...
In sum, "Le Cercle Rouge" is chilly in look and perspective and meticulously constructed. It is devoid of romance, devoid of sex, nearly devoid of sentiment, and lacking speaking parts for women. Melvile's late films creates "a universe without the possibility for salvation, in which love and friendship are brief interludes in the cat-and-mouse games that lead to certain destruction" (quoting Steve Cohn). I think "Le samourai" is the best (focused more tightly on a single existentialist protagonist), but "Le Cercle Rouge" is an impressive heir of the 1940s cinema noire tradition (complete with trench-coats, fedoras, frequent cigarettes, and an American car) and a bridge to hard-boiled color films of the 1990s and 2000s.
Recommended:
Yes
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