![]() the “silent narrative witness”) gets distracted: while the camera is fixed on Costa in the car outside, the gang members inside evidently make their move. As we struggle to make out who’s doing what in the mist, there is so much attention to incidental detail that it seems as if the “camera” (i.e. The heavy rain and wind, clouded in mist and fog, casts a pall over everything – perhaps even more pervasively than the darkness typical of a film noir. It is late in the day, the weather is heavily stormy, and there is almost no dialogue as three of the men, clad in trench coats and fedoras, successively enter the bank, with Costa waiting outside in the car. In the beginning there is a long (11-minute) sequence detailing Simon’s gang robbing a somewhat remote bank situated right next to the ocean. The principal characters are the policeman (Delon) and the collection of people around a smooth nightclub owner and thief (played by Richard Crenna): This pervasive sense of alienation is signaled by an opening title (and later repeated by Delon to a colleague in the story) quoting 18th century French criminologist Francois-Eugene Vidocq to the effect that as far as police are concerned the people they encounter only arouse two feelings, puzzlement and derision. Indeed dialogue in the film is kept to a minimum, and much of the time communication is through the exchange of glances. All of the characters seem so alienated, that there is almost nothing for them to say. In fact that sense of disenchantment, not uncommon to a film noir, is taken to an extreme degree in this film, and it is perhaps its distinguishing feature. ![]() Although he ostensibly upholds the law, he does so with a degree of cynicism appropriate for this noirish landscape, and he has a personal involvement with criminals of similar disenchantment. But in Un Flic, the presumed protagonist is such a cop (that’s what “flic”means in French), and this lead role is played by French superstar and Melville favorite, Alain Delon. So normally you don’t expect a film noir protagonist to be a high ranking policeman, unless it is someone who has booked a ticket to the dark side. ![]() They are often caught in some kind of gloomy, urban maze from which there seems to be no escape. His last film, Un Flic (aka A Cop and Dirty Money), which was made the year before his untimely death in 1973, is so lost in moody and impressionistic images that its narrative absurdities seem not to matter.Īs discussed in my review of Melville’s Le Doulos (1962), the main characters in a film noir are usually disillusioned outsiders and lawbreakers who want to forget the past and have little hope for the future. He took this form of cinematic expression and refined it to almost surreal levels of artistic and dramatic abstraction. There are various arguments concerning the precise specifications and boundaries of film noir, but few can deny that the supreme virtuoso of the genre was French director Jean-Pierre Melville.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |