I don't know if The World will show here. If it's no longer showing in NYC, I may have missed my opportunity to see it in a theater.
How can I really hate VinDiesel when a guy named Chris Knipp used to have a naively ardent website about him?
What about Last Tango in Paris? What about The Sheltering Sky? I liked that. I have a lot of time for The Dreamers myself. What about The Spider's Stratagem?
I was thinking of Vaghe stelle dell'orsa, that's a "muddled mess" about incest too, but I was confused -- that's by Visconti.
Last film I have seen: Jean-Pierre Melville, Un flic. I think I like it better than the new expanded version of Le Cercle rouge of two years before, but color is a letdown after black and white; it's just not really as "noir."
Here are some things I jotted about Un flic:
Jean-Pierre Melville: Un flic (1972)
A last gasp in character
In Melville's last film, Alain Delon is a cop who pursues a small group of fortyish men who first rob a bank and then later intercept a large supply of drugs en-route to somewhere via a bag man on a train. Nobody is morally pure in this story, or wholly evil. One of the robbers is a bank executive who's out of work and hides his wrongdoing from his worried wife. The cop, Edouard Coleman, whose ride is American, as is the robbers', is involved with crooked nightclub owner Simon's accomplice girlfriend, Cathy (Catherine Deneuve), who helps Simon clean up the mess when the robbery goes wrong. Edouard has to look the other way about her involvement. Her first appearance is ravishing: she slides sideways out of a doorway and pauses, framed there, looking perfectly beautiful and slowly smiling as Coleman picks out a jazz ballad on the nightclub piano.
The bank is beside a ruthless sea and the memorably bleached-out and forbidding opening scene is full of mist, rain, and wind that turn everything a sickly pastel. One of the robbers is wounded and they drive away with him, a sequence that may have influenced Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. But these men are as laconic as Quentin's are garrulous.
The drug mule who's intercepted is called "Matthew the Suitcase." The operation to steal his cargo is long and complicated and is Un flic's Rififi episode; it's more absorbing than the manhunt in Le Cercle rouge, but the several plot strains are a bit disjointed.
Despite the ingenious train heist, being a cop and being a crook are in a way just a job -- a "boulot" -- in Un flic. Delon has some dash and dresses sharply, but lacks the panache of his character in Le Samouraï. The robbers are dreary, determined fellows without the charisma of Yves Montand in Le Cercle rouge. They're totally middle-aged and middle-class. This puts them on a par with most of the cops and perhaps illustrates Melville's epigraph, from pioneer French private eye (and former thief) François Eugène Vidocq, "The only emotion men awaken in a policeman are ambiguity and derision." This is on a par with the chief of police in Le Cercle rouge who repeatedly insists that everyone must be assumed to be guilty.
While that earlier chief of police worked out of a dark but cozy Victorian office, Coleman is in a bright modern building and has a phone in his car, but his well-lit office has a window on a brick wall. The dull routine of police work is signaled by the verbal rituals of the carphone calls: His assistant answers and says, "I'll pass you to him." Coleman listens, then says "Where's that?" and "We're going, I'll call you back later." The words never vary. And this flick about a "flic" never wavers from its economical unreeling that's worthy of the best Fifties noirs, despite being in faded blue-gray Technicolor. Melville got back one last time to the old brilliance. Even if the "noir" isn't quite noir, the mood is right, full of resignation and irony.
The plot doesn't quite parse, but neither did Le Doulos'. If it's true as Jack Mathews of the Daily News wrote about the reissued Le Cercle rouge that Melville's crime movies are "really about wearing raincoats and lighting up Gitanes and saying very little while being very loyal," then plot inconsistencies and even visual disparities not withstanding, it's still all good. And even if some of the freshness and flavor were gone, in his last two films Melville shows even greater skill at editing and setting up his scenes. So if not canonical, Un flic is nonetheless another valuable work by this prince of darkness, this splendidly moody minimalist and inspirer of the New Wave.
Posted on Chris Knipp website
