Film Review
By the mid-1960s, the film policier was well on the road to becoming
one of the mainstays of French cinema, although most films in the genre
(including some notable early offerings from Jacques Deray and Edouard
Molinaro) were little more than watered down versions of Jules
Dassin's
Du rififi chez les hommes
(1955).
The only French filmmaker to have brought prestige to the
genre was Jean-Pierre Melville, who delivered two of the finest French
homages to American film noir with
Bob
le flambeur (1955) and
Le Doulos (1962).
Melville's third gangster film,
Le
Deuxième souffle, takes the policier into new, grittier
territory and presages the tougher, more action-oriented crime films of
the 1970s. Don't be put off by Alain Corneau's ghastly 2007
remake of the same title; Melville's original version is easily one of
the director's finest and most important works, a meticulously plotted
policier that distinguishes itself with its unflaggingly inventive
mise-en-scène and flawless performances from a superb cast.
The central themes of
Le
Deuxième souffle are those that prevail through much of
Melville's oeuvre: honour, loyalty, redemption and failure. As in
Bob le flambeur,
Le
Cercle rouge and
Un flic, the film's centrepiece
is a perfectly planned heist that is carried out successfully by a band
of extremely well-organised crooks. As in
Le
Samouraï, the central character is an outlaw who values
his honour above everything else and ends up dying so that his honour
may be restored to him. Characteristically, there is no clear
moral boundary between the lawbreakers and the lawmakers - Melville
appears to be totally unconcerned with the rights and wrongs of
criminal activity. What distinguishes the good guys from the bad
is not whether they are crooks or cops, but whether they have a code of
honour and are willing to stick to it.
Melville's preoccupation with honour and betrayal doubtless stem from
his involvement with the French Resistance during the Second World
War. He was of that generation for whom personal honour was
sacrosanct. The character that Lino Ventura plays in this film -
and would virtually reprise in Melville's later
L'Armée des ombres (1969)
- is the quintessential Melvillian hero, the living embodiment of that
famous line from Shakespeare's
Richard
II: "Mine honour is my life; both grow in one: Take honour from
me, and my life is done." In Melville's dark, lonely macho world,
the only thing a man has that is worth holding onto is his
honour. The caption that opens the film makes the bold statement
that the only choice a man has in life is the choice of his
death. If this choice is determined by an unwillingness to go on
living, his life is meaningless. When he leaves his mistress for
the last time and sets out for a final showdown with his enemies, Gu
Minda has made up his mind to die, not because he is tired of life, but
because he cannot bear to live a life without honour.
Melville could not have made a better choice than Lino Ventura for the
part of the main protagonist Gu Minda (even though he had earlier
contracted Serge Reggiani for the role). A former wrestler,
Ventura has the solid bear-like physique that makes him ideal for the
part, allowing him to dominate every scene he appears in; but he also
brings a nobility, moral authority and just a hint of vulnerability to
his tough guy portrayal, making him a far more humane and likeable
character. Gu Minda may be a hardened criminal, someone who can
put a bullet into a man as easily as look at him, but he is not
unsympathetic. In the best tradition of film noir, he is less a
villain and more a victim of the milieu he has allowed himself to
become trapped in. His one ambition is to escape and start a new
life, an ambition that will be cruelly thwarted.
Gu's nemesis, the redoubtable police chief Blot, admirably portrayed by
Paul Meurisse, is a far more ambiguous character. When Blot is
introduced to us he is more vaudevillian than threatening, not too far
removed from the supercilious character that Meurisse had played in
Georges Lautner's popular comedy-thriller
Le
Monocle noir (1961). Blot positively drools with
snidy sarcasm as he interrogates the witnesses of a barroom killing,
literally putting words into their mouths. But as he pursues Gu,
a darker side to Blot's character emerges. Like his underling,
Inspector Fardiano, he appears willing to use any means possible to
capture the criminal and his associates. Just when we think we
know who Blot is, he surprises us one more time, right at the end of
the film. He makes a connection with Gu and redeems both himself
and the gangster by exposing the fraud by which Gu was robbed of his
honour. Blot resembles the shady resistance leader that Meurisse
would later play in
L'Armée
des ombres, a man who turns out to be far more than he seems.
By contrast, the true villains of the piece are clearly signposted:
Marcel Bozzuffi's gangster Jo Ricci and Paul Frankeur's Inspector
Fardiano have no redeeming features, both are prepared to stoop to any
means to achieve their objectives. They are the morally bereft
counterpoint to the Minda-Blot pairing, and even though Fardiano is
acting from far nobler motives than Ricci, he is just as deserving of
our contempt. Fardiano demeans his profession by resorting to
underhand tactics, just as Ricci demeans himself by betraying his
brother Paul (Raymond Pellegrin). One of the more interesting
characters is Manouche, the token woman in what is so evidently a man's
world. Stylishly played by Christine Fabréga, Manouche is
the archetypal Melvillian heroine - she seems to understand
better than anyone else what is going on, and yet she is completely
powerless to influence events. She offers Gu a way out, a chance
to start a new life, but she is like a child standing on the sidelines
of a battle scene. All she can do is watch helplessly as the men
go about their business, like sheep marching insouciantly downhill
towards the abattoir.
Le Deuxième souffle
shows a subtle departure from the American noir stylisation of
Melville's previous crime films and anticipates the creeping minimalism
of his later films. Melville wrote the screenplay in
collaboration with José Giovanni, a former criminal who narrowly
escaped a death sentence and subsequently found success as a writer and
filmmaker. Adapting his novel
Un
règlement de comptes, Giovanni draws on his own
experience to paint a starkly realist portrait of the criminal
underworld (le Milieu) and the French judicial system. Melville's
mise-en-scène builds on this and the result is far grittier, far
more naturalistic than anything else Melville directed. The
film's two big set-pieces, the prison break-out at the beginning and
the drawn-out heist sequence half-way through, are enacted with next to
no dialogue and no music, something that brings an unbearable tension
to both scenes. (The influence of Robert Bresson's
Un condamné à mort s'est
échappé and Jules Dassin's
Du rififi chez les hommes is
evident in these sequences.) What is perhaps more surprising is
how remorselessly violent
Le
Deuxième souffle is. Every physical assault and
every killing are staged to provoke a shock reaction, never letting us
forget the brutality of the dog-eat-dog world in which they take
place. Gu's ill-treatment at the hands of the police is
particularly graphic and manages to be even more viscerally shocking
than the climactic shootout in which most of the dramatis personae come to a very sticky end.
It is interesting that in his subsequent gangster films Melville would
turn away from realism and gravitate towards a more stylised
representation of violence. From
Le Samouraï onwards, Melville
ceased to be preoccupied with merely imitating American film noir and
appeared to be driven increasingly to deconstruct the genre, stripping
away layers of artifice in an attempt to get at the bare essentials and
perhaps uncover just why it is we find crime films so compelling.
Whilst Melville's gangster films are thematically very similar,
stylistically they show an extraordinarily pronounced transition, which
takes us from the sordid reality of
Bob
le flambeur to the dreamlike abstraction of
Un flic.
Le Deuxième souffle comes at
the mid-point of this journey, a grimly brutal thriller that proved to
be an important milestone in the development of the French film
policier. With nine full-length films under his belt, Jean-Pierre
Melville had already come to be recognised as one of France's most
important filmmakers, but his four greatest films were yet to come...
© James Travers 2012
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Next Jean-Pierre Melville film:
Le Samouraï (1967)