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Summary
A band of crooks carry out a bank robbery and then an incredible hold-up on a train.
When he investigates the crimes, Parisian detective Commissaire Coleman discovers that
they were masterminded by his friend - the night club owner Simon, abetted by his seductive
girlfriend, Cathy...
Review
For his final film, Jean-Pierre Melville returns to the genre which he felt most comfortable
with and in which he excelled, the existentialist crime thriller. Un flic
comes from the same mould as his earlier masterpieces, such as Le
Cercle rouge, Le
Deuxième souffle and Le
Samouraï, portraying a grim world of masculine solitude and violence in which
crime seldom pays. Here, Melville attempted to go further than he dared in his earlier
films to depict the moral equivalence of crook and cop, and seems to conclude that the
two classes of individuals differ only in the way in which they follow their chosen careers:
the crook is an artist, the cop a petty bureaucrat. The difficulty is that the film
veers to far to the abstract and in doing so loses contact with the audience.
The film has an amazing opening sequence, with a magnificently shot bank robbery set
on a windswept coast. The cold, detached style in which this sequence is filmed
is evocative of Melville’s greatest films and there is a sense that Un flic could
be the director’s best work yet. Unfortunately, the plot quickly gets muddled and
the perspective shifts from the concrete to the abstract. Melville’s attention to
detail, often his strength, proves to be the film’s downfall, and some parts of the film
(such as the train heist) are overly directed.
The film is also far less technically accomplished than Melville’s earlier works.
This is in part due to compromises needed to achieve the film’s ambitious sequences on
a limited budget (Melville often had difficulty getting the level of financial support
he hoped for ). This is most noticeable in the train hold-up sequence, which is
filmed with a combination of full-size studio props and scale models of a train and helicopter.
By today’s standards, the sequence is laughably bad and renders the entire sequence totally
unconvincing.
Un flic is also let down by some lacklustre acting performances. Even Catherine
Deneuve fails to sparkle, despite her evident talent and beauty. The film sees Alain
Delon playing a law-enforcer rather than a law-breaker for the first time in his
career. Having established himself in tough criminal roles over the past decade,
the actor fails to convince, and this could have been a major factor in the film's failure
at the box office.
© James Travers 2001
Usually the heist or robbery doesn’t arrive until the climax, after we’ve come to know
the participants, and it unfolds after-hours in near silence in the city. In Jean-Pierre
Melville’s A Cop, the bank robbery in a western
French coastal town opens the film in waning daylight as a storm rages. Inside the
bank, the robbers don sunglasses, making them appear as aliens, as the crashing sound
of sea distracts our attention, making the robbers’ concentration seem all that more alien,
superhuman. One of them, wounded, will be dispatched in hospital by his compatriots, through
the agency of their leader Simon’s girlfriend, Cathy, dressed as a nurse: an image of
mercy committing cold-blooded murder.
Cathy is also in bed with Edouard, the Parisian police chief. At one point Edouard
also dons sunglasses; are they all the same? Edouard is brutal, cynical; he brusquely
beats the arrested and holds in complicated bondage a transvestite informant who aches
for freedom. The world is morally ambiguous, and Coleman’s coldness and cruelty recall
both the authorities and the Resistance during the Occupation thirty years earlier.
Many decry that Melville’s last film wasn’t one of his masterpieces; but it’s a summary
work that closes a phenomenal body of work. Alain Delon is brilliant as Edouard,
a man so coolly monstrous that when he opens a bathroom door to apprehend a criminal he
instantly closes it to give the man a second longer to complete his suicide, thus saving
the state (and Edouard himself) time, trouble.
Needless to say, Edouard’s motives
are muddied when he finally has his quick-trigger showdown in the street with Simon as
Cathy watches. Simon, it turns out, is unarmed: murder passing for suicide, and suicide
masking police business-as-usual. Un flic
is a modern, transplanted American western.
© Dennis Grunes 2007
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