Le deuxième souffle

... from France and French director Jean-Pierre Melville

An aging criminal, Gustave "Gu" Minde, breaks out of prison after having been there for ten years and is therefore being searched for by the police. He wanted to hide out in another country, but has insufficient funds to do so. He signs on to one last caper so he can retire - the heist of 800 million francs worth of platinum from an armored car. This will require the killing of the two motorcycle cops accompanying the armored car, and the killing of one of them is Gu's part in the crime. He doesn't like the idea of doing this, but ultimately looks upon it as just business, not personal - like he's firing some long time employee because of business conditions. Gu's attempt at staying free is complicated by Commissaire Blot, who is hot on his trail. Complications ensue.

This film at over 150 minutes in length did not drag at all, even though the heist doesn't occur until about 90 minutes into the film, because the characters are fascinating, even though there is a dearth of dialogue, maybe BECAUSE there is a dearth of dialogue. What these characters do speaks for themselves.

Gu is very interesting - A real antihero. We learn he has killed before the events in this film, and as I mentioned before he is not a psychopath who enjoys killing but does it when he considers it necessary. But what really bothers him is if his reputation for never talking to the authorities and giving up associates is impugned. For that reputation he will do most anything to restore his "honor", and that leads to the interesting conclusion.

The little things are very important in this film - the shot of the ants at work on the ground as the robbers wait for the armored car to appear on the desolate road, and a scene of Gu enjoying a good meal after having been in prison for so long.

I'd recommend this one. It was one of the most interesting heist films I've seen made in any nation. Kudos to Eddie Muller for showing this on Turner Classic Movie's Noir Alley.

I don't speak French, but the acting and the subtitled dialog are outstanding throughout.

The plot and each situation, each conversation, is completely credible, and follows naturally, yet not predictably, from what came before.

A note to younger audiences: there are no highly choreographed fight scenes or stylized gun battles (though there are fights and shooting). No throw-away romantic interest. No noticeable special effects. No wisecracking. No mood music telling you what to feel.

So, if you're used to recent Hollywood fare, it may seem slow.

But, to this noir-lover, it feels fresh, yet as gritty as a run-down apartment in a hundred year-old building.

Why do I always care about thieves in heist films, no matter how bad they are? As is common in Jean-Pierre Melville's later films, this meticulously crafted crime film opens with a title card that epigrammatically sets out a foreboding epigram that molds ostensible meaning into the action: "A man is given but one right at birth: to choose his own death. But if he chooses because he's weary of his own life, then his entire existence has been without meaning." It's invariably inhibiting to totally apply these fatalistic, existential aphorisms to the films that thus proceed, but they tend to cast a distinct outlook across the film. I'm not so sure that this slow, deliberate caper, or any of Melville's others for that matter, seeks all of the indications of this quote, but its pretext of fate, mortality and grim, solipsistic judgment corresponds with the essential themes of the film.

Like Le Cercle Rouge, Le Deuxième Soufflé is a nominal saga, an antithetical and composite film in which the life seems as if to impose and simultaneously exhale. Ventura's performance is both innate and disciplined by his claustrophobic settings. There are several instances set within moving cars, less to expand the atmosphere than to show the inhibition of the space they employ.

What frustrates and somewhat detaches me however is that Melville never seems to give his characters any involved cognitive measure. They're characterized and assessed by the black and white of their behavior. Gu is a ruthless, intractable and curtailed presence who gains recognition, even from Inspector Blot, another wonderfully named character, played by Paul Meurisse, who respects his deadly actions because he eventually complies with and doesn't veer from his dang "code."

Much of this 1966 cops-and-robbers film can be explained just in terms of its distilled preoccupation with the reference to the conventions regarding the treatment of Chandler, McBain, W.R. Burnett, Jim Thompson, stylish Hollywood crime dramas, and classic American gangster pictures. Melville's films in this mode have the element of photogenics, conformity to modern ideas and models nourished by a shadowy nonchalance and the characters' affectedly memorialized mannerisms. For instance when a dutiful thug prepares to meet the other gang members, casing the place first, but also anticipating the blanket preconditions of the scene. This dogmatic behavior underscores the salutary definitions of these characters, their movements having a textbook role. You can also see Melville's influence on Tarantino's Jackie Brown when the thug is dramatically pre-performing the differing poses of the impending standoff. Also, it's not until Gu changes into clothing more mindfully echoing that of a gangster that he is allowed to free himself from being so secretive and concealed.

The sullen, inflamed and exceedingly conventionalized quality of this typified film conveys Melville's immersion in the downbeat deliberation of the play of loyalty and destined disloyalty. With this transcendent crime film, as per Melville's usual, complete with another great title, Second Wind, Melville pushes the tonal qualities and gray scale of the image to new levels. The movie's preoccupation with issues of fellowship, abnormally all-consuming professionalism, silence, and duplicity reverberates with Melville's own distinction as an egocentric, tight-lipped, fringe-dwelling figure in French cinema, who despite his success never truly declared participation or involvement in any founded generation or evolution of filmmakers.

Three prisoners break from the prison and the notorious Gustave 'Gu' Minda (Lino Ventura) is the only one that survives. He heads to Paris where he meets his lover Manouche (Christine Fabrega) and his friend and Manouche's bodyguard Alban (Michel Constantin) that take him to a hideout. Meanwhile the smart Commissary Blot (Paul Meurisse) is investigating a shooting plotted by the mobster Jo Ricci (Marcel Bozzufi) and the gangster Jacques the Lawyer (Raymond Loyer) that is murdered.

Gu decides to travel to Italy but he is short of money; his friend Orloff (Pierre Zimmer) invites him to participate in the heist of an armored truck with his friend Paul Ricci (Raymond Pellegrin) and the gangsters Antoine (Denis Manuel) and Pascal (Pierre Grasset) in Marseille. The talkative Inspector Fardiano (Paul Frankeur) is responsible for the investigation, but the persistent Commissary Blot believes that Gu is behind the scheme.

"Le Deuxième Soufflé" is a realistic police story by Jean-Pierre Melville with great performances. It is impressive how I did not feel the 150 minutes running time, since the screenplay is very well written. The code of honor of Gu contrasts with the lack of ethics of the police detectives. The duel between Gu and Blot is another attraction of this great movie. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Os Profissionais do Crime" ("The Professionals of the Crime")

I had seen nearly everything that is readily available from Jean-Pierre Melville in the United States by the time I got to Le Deuxieme soufflé, which may be part of why I didn't respond overwhelmingly to it. After such challenging, methodical and precisely existential crime masterpieces as Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, Bob le flambeur and the underrated Le Doulos, this one just seemed to not pack the same kind of punch that the others did. Again, this may be the fault on the viewer for seeing this last among his mostly thriller-oriented oeuvre, but perhaps it's also some of Melville's fault too; again and again, as the dedicated and ruthless auteur that he was (one of the great French directors I would argue), he kept coming back to men in trench-coats with grim expressions figuring out on both sides- criminal and detective- of how to plot the next move or, for the former, how to keep from the fatalism of the plot.

Which, for Melville, is something that comes second nature. The difference, perhaps, in this case is that the length (a whopping two and a half hours, longer than both The Red Circle and Army of Shadows) and the amount of details in the structure of the story (i.e. what happened on such and such a day made this happened could've been snipped, albeit I can't pinpoint to which) bog down some of the more successful aspects to the picture. Which is also to say that for all of its minor misgivings, Le Deuxieme soufflé (or, simply, The Second Breath) is near-classic Melville, with nail-bitingly tense suspense scenes like the opening escape from the prison and the latter heist sequence- somewhat more obvious and less coolly ambitious as Red Circle.

There's the amazing cinematography as well, a trademark of Melville and his crew to make things gritty but smooth in precision and style, and the performances from Paul Meurisse as the Detective (maybe my favorite performance of the picture just for the intelligence he imbues in the character), and Lino Ventura as one of the quintessential Melville anti-heroes, Gu, the convict who wants in on the big 200 million heist. And even as it could be Melville's most "talky" picture after Bob le flambeur (which is relative to how pleasantly light, or how seemingly sparse, his films are with dialog), when the characters speak it's to the point of with some quotable spunk to them.

There's an icy, unspoken angst in Melville's world of criminals, almost questioning but still true to the notion of the 'policier', where you'd want the criminals to get away with it if the detective wasn't so doggone determined all the time. It's another fine piece of film-making from the director, just not an all-time-top flick - more along the lines of Un flic. 8.5/10