JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE'S LE SAMOURAI

A Puff of Smoke: 
Like Leone’s Westerns, Le Samourai invents a genre while transcending it.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s cool Zen-noir, in which style and substance are so intertwined as to be inseparable, relies a savoring of noir conventions, on deafening ambient sound (no silent room in any film was ever louder than the many silent rooms in Le Samourai), almost no dialogue and the willingness of the viewer to be entranced (that is, the film is really slow).

Alain Delon plays a mysterious hitman; the movie opens with a shot of an apparently empty room. We only know Delon’s there when he exhales a lungful of Galoise Blue. Thus Melville lets us know from the get-go that Delon’s character is all myth—he has no more reality than a puff of smoke. Yet, he’s fascinating…Delon’s pulls a contract job, leaves a witness alive, visits his mistress, steals a car, uses his pet canary to detect eavesdropping equipment left in his bed-sit by blundering cops, steals another car, beats the living daylights out of a couple of French hoods and takes a very long, complicated ride on Le Metro. The effect owes more to Bresson than Bob Le Flambeur (Melville’s comedy of manners masquerading as a bank-heist flick).

Delon and Melville are after transcendence, a Zen doing so perfect that the task becomes irrelevant. Both achieve it. This work of genius has been a Holy Grail for noir-heads, Melville devotees and uh, transcendentalists for years. Our suffering at the hands of shit VHS copies & grainy French-format imports is over. Film Forum showed an awe-inspiring print last year; now Criterion has brought out the DVD version the film deserves. Features include an interview with Rui Noqueira, author of Melville On Melville, archival interviews with Melville & Delon, and an essay from David Thomson. These add value and insight to the film. Go buy it right now.

Melville, Maggie & A Box of Classics

Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966), Dir: Jean-Pierre Melville, Criterion

The immovable object: Lino Ventura © Criterion 1966.

For Melville, physical courage exists to prove moral courage. Outlaw allegiance, upheld in blood and suffering, grants crooks their nobility —it renders their lives neither meaningless nor sordid. Conniving cops, with the law on their side, never pay for their lies, and are found wanting in honor by thieves and murderers. 

Deuxiéme embraces this contradiction directly. It’s what the story is about, never mind assassinated motorcycle cops, looted armored cars tumbling off thousand-foot cliffs or matter-of-fact bloodbaths in tiny rented rooms. That Melvilleian combination of casual, gutter beauty and meticulous order harkens to 1960’s Le Trou (Jacques Becker) and Classe tous risqué (Claude Sautet), and both are based on hard-boiled novels by former death-row inmate Jose Giovanni, who also wrote Deuxiéme.

Apparently Melville’s way of dealing with the nouvelle vague that threatened to make him irrelevant was to ignore it. His old-school visual grammar, which somehow co-exists with pyrotechnic capers and shoot-outs, becomes neoclassicism, and shows all les whippersnappers where they got their transgressive moral—and subversive visual—ideas in the first place. The moral rigor Melville finds more compelling than any heist or love story manifests in his throwback composition and cutting. His opening shots pay homage to Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1957), and Deuxiéme exudes an incongruous Bressonian air of penitential suffering and saint-like patience. Stone-faced Lino Ventura awaits his fate in a series of grubby hide-outs, and is undone only when he expresses the tiniest shred of human emotion. Give him men to kill and he does not blink; fool his murdering friends into regarding him as a snitch and he goes berserk. And, for all the blood on Lino’s hands, the way the cops trick him feels like an ethical outrage.

If Melville were just a hair less deliberate, the crime story would dominate. For any other director, the mind-blowing caper in the middle of the picture would be the climax—of the film and of a life’s work. Melville presents it all in a weirdly gripping monotone. Crime exists to pay the rent; the true struggle takes place inside a man’s soul. Melville’s rigorous Zen reductivism would find its true expression one year later in his masterpiece, Le Samourai. Deuxiéme remains his most sincere, least ironic noir, the one most vested in narrative. Of course it’s a classic.

The DVD extras feature a remarkably eloquent and illuminating interview with director Bernard Tavenier.

 

 

 Man in a sewer, "Do The Madison" and hot donkey love. © Rialto Pictures

10 Years of Rialto Pictures, Criterion

A godsend, a crucial library, an extraordinarily rich, efficient introduction to a range of cinema touchstones. The set includes (best film ever made?) The Third Man;Touchez pas au grisbi, an early, brutal, debonair French noir and a key influence on Melville, Becker, and Dassin; Rififi, Dassin’s existential, misanthropic caper-noir, featuring a history-making wordless twenty-minute heist; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the most concise and accessible of Bunuel’s comedies of manners; Band of Outsiders, which features Godard’s sweetest set-pieces: the six-minute Louvre and Do The Madison; and Bresson’s heartbreaking Au Hasard Balthazar.Balthazar functions for Bresson as this set partially functions for a particular period: as a profound gateway to more complex films and ideas. Given that the set contains six top-20-ever-made pictures, the remaining four suffer a bit by comparison. Army of Shadows might be the only accurate drama of the French Underground made by a member of the French Underground, but Melville’s narrative is too lugubrious for me. Billy Liar’s Angry Young Men concerns leave it dated, though Tom Courtenay still commands the screen. Murderous Maids—as a 2000 release the most current film by almost 30 years – tries to merge Chabrol-style working-class-vs.-ruling-class true-life violence with red-hot lesbo action. That’s a tough combo to pull off and it succeeds intermittently. Mafioso suffers from simply being an unfunny farce.

It’s almost a joke—a legend—how difficult it was to find these films before the DVDrevolution. How scratchy, miserable 16mm prints were projected on bedsheets hung in dormitory basements, and how seminal the Film Forum (Rialto partner Bruce Goldstein has programmed at the Film Forum for over 20 years) and other repertory houses were in providing the only glimpse possible of these pictures. And now here they are together, reasonably priced, a fingertip reservoir of history, influences and cross-currents, packed up smaller than a Tom Clancy novel: Cinema 101 in a box.

Maggie rules Paris © Zeitgeist Films (1996).

Irma Vep (1996), Dir. Olivier Assayas, Zeitgeist Films

It looked for a while there like Assayas was going to prove a significant, groundbreaking director. Instead he ended up making the same picture over and over, even if he always found new subject matter.Irma Vep appeared as an aberration, a backstage movie-about-a-movie, a comedy of manners and romance with more meta than most romances could bear. Twelve years later, this apparent confection is clearly Assayas’s best picture, his most heartfelt, and a genuine valentine to the nouvelle vague, to the jovial insanity of film-making and to the (at that time anyway) love of his life, Hong Kong action goddess Maggie Cheung. The most engaging meta (because it seems to be unconscious) is Assayas falling in love with his leading lady through the lens of his camera. Cheung glows with an inner light and perfect lighting as no one has glowed since Godard fell for Anna Karina. Cheung’s director is way smitten, and Assayas’s infatuation renders his pretensions more sweet than galling—most of the time. Truffaut’s alter-ego Jean-Pierre Leaud metas up a storm as a director who’s past his prime and crazy as a shit-house rat. Any laughter is undercut with unease, because Leaud does seem a total loon. And, speaking of goddesses, Bulle Ogier—Jacque Rivette’s muse and leading lady ­—here gleefully loses herself in a cameo as a meddlesome best friend. As in all of Assayas’s pictures, everyone is gorgeous, chic like mad and froggily verbose. Despite Vep’s excess of charm, watching involves a constant struggle between irritation (at its unnecessarily mannered and self-congratulatory style) and appreciation (at so many riotous self-referential performances). In the end, however, we are as powerless as Assayas before the astonishing beauty and grace of Maggie Cheung

Classes tous risques (1960) Criterion DVD

From left, Claude Cerval, Lino Ventura, France Asselin, Amié de March and Michel Ardan in Classe Tous Risques. © Rialto Picture

After fighting in the Resistance during WWII, Jose Giovanni became a small-time French hood. He helped pull a small-time robbery, somebody died, and Giovanni got death row. After months awaiting the guillotine, he gained clemency and spent eight years in prison. There, he wrote. And three of his many novels-Classe tous risques, Le trou and Le Deuxiéme Souffle- were adapted into classics of hardboiled French film noir.

 Le Deuxiéme Souffle, Jean-Pierre Melville’s seldom seen masterpiece, is finally out on a beautiful Criterion DVD and Le trou -a jailbreak movie without a jailbreak- became Jacques Becker’s ode to the futility of effort. Classe, based on the true story of a legendary outlaw whom Giovanni befriended on death row, is a treatise to the enduring noir trope that to live outside the law one must be honest. (And that fate will always undo your plans.)

Everything goes pear-shaped from the opening sequence, when walking Mount Rushmore Lino Venturi stages a heist on the streets of Milan with his pal Stan Krol, a charismatic French Lee Marvin who appeared in only three films. Krol was a jailhouse buddy of Giovanni’s. In the excellent, if brief, interviews included in the extras on this disc, Giovanni cites Krol’s ‘physique Americaine’; Krol provides the irresistible force to Ventura’s immovable object. There’s little point citing the millions of caper movies that copiedrisques’s opening crime, but the breath-taking vitality of its violence, it’s hair-raising chase scenes and its characters’ glee in being badass has not aged a day in forty-eight years. An animal as willful as Krol is not long for this earth, and his replacement in the loyal buddy capacity is Jean-Paul Belmondo in the last of his supporting roles before breaking huge in Godard’s Breathless.

Belmondo appears impossibly relaxed, charismatic and even shy – a complete natural slowly connecting to his own genius by staying out of its way. When he and Ventura share the frame, their stardom assumes such opposite form and expression. Ventura’s monosyllabic presence, with a capital P, gives room to Belmondo’s restlessness, and they become their characters: the embittered, unshakeable old pro and the brash, unbeatable young stud. Ventura believes only in family, whether of blood or obligation. Belmondo, determined to be worthy, serves as loyally as Venutra’s wife, pal and kids; little works out for any of them. Criterion’s print is flawless, and highlights Sautet’s stark framing and brutal high-contrast lighting. Glimmers of the oncoming Point Blank and the clearly influential Riffifi are equally apparent in Sautet’s clean, cold visuals and sparse dialogue. Sautet subsumes the noir that came before and slams a coffin lid on all its futile aspirations.