A Cop

For a police thriller, this movie chose the strange angles of architecture and fashion from which to tell the story. Throughout, the film actively tries to showcase a new, modern France. In the weird opening sequence, we see a sea-side resort with an endless row of brand-new apartment blocks, totally void of human presence in a foul winter-weather. Strangely, from afar, a shop in one of the buildings seem open. Because of the abundant lighting, we might be tempted to think it's a bar, but it's a bank (about to be robbed). The police headquarters is another modern building given lots of camera-attention by Melville, who seems to juxtapose this 'new' France to the old; the contrasts with scenes of the 'old Paris' such as the closing scenes at the Arc de Triomphe are great.

The male characters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time to groom their looks. Both Alain Delon and the excellent bad guy Richard Crenna (Simon) are given lengthy shots showing them combing their hair. They parade around in flawless suits, slick ties, lush bathrobes, gold cuff links. These are sharp dressed men, vain and self-obsessed, misogynist and gay-bashing. The gorgeous can-can girls are there (like in so many other Melville movies) but no-one seems to notice them. Delon manipulates a beautiful transvestite into thinking he might fall for her charms, only to beat her up when she fails to deliver on a promise.

Catherine Deneuve on the other hand seems less well served, sartorially speaking; I was not very impressed with her acting performance in this film, but perhaps my judgment is influenced by the ugly earrings she wears throughout. The closing titles highlight that the black dress worn by 'Mademoiselle Deneuve' was by Yves Saint Laurent. I don't know why this was pointed out, since the dress is hideous. Deneuve's finest moment was when she plays an angel of death, wearing a haute couture caricature of the nurse uniform. Quentin Tarantino must have been directly inspired by this to create Daryl Hannah's nurse look when she is set to murder Uma Thurman at the start of Kill Bill vol 1.

All in all, the plot was not that interesting, but since the male actors were all in terrific form it was a very pleasurable movie to watch.

Neglected Melville crime thriller isn't exactly good, but isn't bad either -- feels half-finished, more than anything. Crenna and Delon are friends; they're also on different sides of the law, with Delon a cop and Crenna secretly the head of a gang of thieves who specialize in risky heists. On the other hand, Delon is secretly carrying on with Catherine Denuve, Crenna's girlfriend. Plot too allusive for it's own good -- a bit more grounding of the characters are needed, since their motivations as it stands are opaque (why are Delon and Crenna friends? why is Delon carrying on with Deneuve? if Crenna knows, as he seems to, why is he allowing it? what does Denuve think of all this?). Low budget also hurts the movie -- the centerpiece of the film, an elaborate heist on board a moving train, looks phony and very cheap. (This is a rare movie that probably would benefit from a remake). On the other hand, Melville remains a master of gloomy atmosphere, the setpieces more or less work (the opening sequence, a bank robbery in a cold and rainy seaside town, is well done) and the actors all give it their best. Final shot of the movie is very well done.

Career criminals wear fedoras and trenchcoats like its 1945 and they're attending a Robert Mitchum impersonation competition. Rain isn't weather; it's sexytime music for a cocaine heist. The world is covered in an uncompromising azure mist that squeezes the life out of every possibility of beauty, whether that beauty is reaching Catherine Deneuve's white blonde demeanor or an enticingly French city street. A Jean-Pierre Melville directed crime film rests in a middle-ground of romanticization and adamant realism; it climaxes at the nearest sight of a Humphrey Bogart photograph, but it's also interested in telling a story where a robbery can be delivered with seamless perfection ... but that doesn't mean that a pessimistic cop won't catch up with you in the end in a hazardously bloody fashion.

Un Flic is a relatively minor Melville film (especially putting Bob le Flambeur and Le Cercle Rouge into consideration), but it's ravishing all the same. Like the problematic comprehensibility of The Big Sleep, it isn't worried about tight narrative. It's about temperament and atmosphere, and it's safe to say that the ambiance of Un Flic is penetrative enough to make your bones break. There's something uneasy that leaks from the ghost blue of the cinematography and Richard Crenna's depressed eyes; the placid slickness of it all can only reach so far before someone is shot.

Telling the interconnecting stories of a tireless cop (Alain Delon) and a nightclub owner (Crenna) who pulls off massively intricate jobs with big payoffs, Un Flic is squalid enough to make us squirm; criminals walk right under the noses of the police, while the police, as well-meaning as they are, are confined to a purgatory of law-breaking with payoffs that brings no one pleasure. In so many other crime films, there's a notion that once the main villains are locked up, the heroes are left satisfied, ready for their next big adventure. But Un Flic exists in an entirely different universe. The chasing and capturing of criminals is tiring, redundant even. Who is having more fun: the sinners, or the rule- followers?

Initially, the film seems as though it's going to transform into a full- fledged exercise in film noir style. Cigarettes are tossed around, liquor is spilled, and femme fatales are easy to come by. But the closer we get to the conclusion, we begin to realize something: Delon's character, Edouard Coleman, isn't a James Bond or a Frank Bullitt or a Harry Callahan. He is a man, a man who was intrigued by enforcing the law many moons ago but is finally growing restless from the unavoidable sleazy details he sees on a day to day basis. Behind his eyes is a glassy emptiness; if he were to throw away his badge this very moment, what difference would it make?

I suppose Un Flic's melancholy edge is what gives it such a lasting impression. The story is too complicated to easily follow and the style is one and the same with Melville's other films. But that blue, that blue, is disturbing. Unlike black-and-white, it gives reality a grit never seen by the naked eye. Crime doesn't pay and don't we know it, but in Un Flic, even renowned actors like Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve can hardly live in a world this hopeless.

This is a film so good, in how it understands the minutiae of film, the mechanics as it were, and done with so much straight-forward conviction that it amazes deeply.

It is lean, the form refined, like a piece of wood patiently chiseled by the ebbs.

So as with previous Melville films, it is distant, surely cold, clinical business. It's about characters detached from the world they experience, content to glide through without attachments. A world as grey, dreary and sullen as the faces of the characters, one reflected in the other. The pace is minimalist and monotonous, the movie plodding along in a steady and unflagging hypnosis as if it does not progress at all.

It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance, the plot laconic in what it reveals as much as the dialogue, yet it flows towards its inevitable and cold end in an unnoticeable succession of undeviating changes. A phone-call, a newspaper clipping, a man setting down to eat in a restaurant. Before you know it a man is getting shot.

It's part slow erotic foreplay about cinematic crime, remember the scene with Deneuve and the gun, and part a feel that is the present moment unfettered by any including cinematic baggage. You just watch.

Perhaps under-looked when looking at the career of the director Jean-Pierre Melville, Un Flic (called 'Dirty Money' in the states, but is also translated as 'A Cop' on the DVD I viewed) is a crime film that goes another step with the heist genre, another (smaller) step with the cop/robber relationship, and shows Melville in (mostly) complete control over his storytelling. There are elements that seem to have evolved (or devolved, whichever you prefer) in Melville's work with the three films going in descending order- Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, and finally this film.

As this very loose trilogy progresses (a trilogy I mark just by the presence of Alain Delon, nothing more in common aside from the genre), one may notice how Melville progresses with his stylizing, how with each film he goes a little less with characterization and dialog. With Le Samourai it's half a character study, in Le Cercle Rouge there are snippets, here it's all based on the timing of the cuts and subtle reactions. In fact, there is so much of the film that goes without dialog that Melville proves himself to be an opposite of Tarantino- instead of being clever at dialog, he's clever at the plot twist, and more importantly at making note of the 'left-out' detail, letting the audience figure it out. While one can say this is not a great place for someone not familiar with Melville's work to start, it should not be a big disappointment.

The story is one you may have seen before, only here in far more calculated circumstances. Simon (Richard Crenna, in one of his better turns) is one of four who rob a seaside bank on a rainy, foggy afternoon. In one of Melville's most polished sequences, things go good and bad for them when one of the men is fatally wounded. Edouard Coleman (Alain Delon, not his best, but always keen at being icy) is on a case that coincides with another scheme Simon has, involving a suitcase heist on a moving train during the night. Not everything goes as planned, and the presence of a mutual love interest for the two (Catherine Deneuve, practically one-sided emotionally) only complicates things further, if not on the surface. This story is told very, very simply and without anything aside from the injection of mood onto every scene.

From the opening heist on, Melville still has his chops technically-wise almost all the way through the picture. And after reading an interview with him, something about the look of the film made sense (which he said before this film was made): "My dream is to make a color film in black and white, in which there is only one tiny detail to remind us that we really are watching a film in color." One feels that is what Melville is successfully experimenting with in this film, that the methods to which he and cinematographer Walter Wottizm get the scenes are not conventional. To correspond with some of the characters, the colors are cold, or distant, corresponding almost to the unforgiving underworld of Paris- some colors seem to almost blend together, the browns going along with the grays, and the brighter ones (sometimes merely in the background) feeling diluted.

That, and the crafty editing pulled by Patricia Neny (the suspense gets laid on thick in some scenes), make up for a couple of big liabilities- that Melville, on tight a budget that he was on, used models for the exteriors of the train sequence, and some scenes don't have a 'new-wave' feeling (i.e. filmed directly on location) but rather cheaply in the studio. Not to mention that the performances from Delon and Deneuve are not really at their peak (Crenna is another matter).

Still, the most pleasurable thing about a Melville film, whether its the poetic Les Enfants Terribles or the bittersweet Bob le Flambeur, is watching the story take on a life of its own. Some things you practically wait on if you've seen Le Cercle Rouge or Le Samourai, like a wild dancing number at a nightclub (here abridged), or a detail to remind everyone who the outsiders are in this world (here portrayed by Gaby).

As another tribute to the old-style crime films of the 30's and 40's its still tightly held together, with the pacing almost impeccable. In short, it's not a masterpiece of a crime film (Melville's last before his fatal heart attack), but it remains gripping thirty plus years later, with memorable qualities.