The only sentiments that mankind has ever been able to inspire in the police are ambivalence and derision (Frančois-Eugéne Vidocq).
People prattle on with their smart alecky dismissal of authorship – defined in the most reductive way possible so as to allow for a straw argument — but in the first five minutes of UN FLIC you’re already in another, deeper, richer, more complex and more beautiful realm than in any of the Giovannis, or even Derays, or other polars. It’s so palpable: the wind, the fog, the waves, the lights turning on simultaneously as if to announce a sadness — gorgeous. No wonder Delon dedicated POUR LA PEAU D’UN FLIC (1981)to Jean-Pierre Melville. He made polars lesser directors could only aspire to. Delon acknowledged that he himself could never dream of making a film like Melville or Visconti; only they could make them. Delon had to make something else. What remained unspoken was that it was also something lesser, at least as a director
The seaside bank-robbery at the beginning is followed by a sequence in which Commissaire Edouard Coleman (Alain Delon) is called to a different type of robbery. A young hustler, under 18, has tried to rob an elderly gay man of a valuable sculpture (see clip above). The con is that the boys pretend they’re 20, steal from the older gents, but blackmail them into not calling the police as they’re minors. ‘We’re targeted by real professionals.’ ‘You’re only charged if you are repeat offenders,’ says the inspector. ‘We all are,’ says the victim.
It’s a beautiful moment in the film, one which made me understand why queers of a previous generation looked to film noir for representations of homosexuality. In this era homosexuality was a crime and it signifies criminality in these films. A queer appears and already they connote an underworld, blackmail, seediness, sadness, uncontrollable desire, transgression , liminality and perversity, The figure of the homosexual is as much a liminal figure — between desire and crime — in noir as the boxer, the gangster or the gambler, usually not given as much screen time, thus condensed into a more potent signifier. It has its romance but must then also have had social consequences: all those sad young men looking at these images, often the only ones available. It now has a certain romance but one can understand why it then politicised critics like Vito Russo.
When I first saw UN FLIC, I took the representations of gay and trans figures in this film as homophobic. Having now seen the film again, I see it differently. There’s an understanding and a generosity in the figure of Coleman as played by Delon and as filmed by Melville. Note the sympathy in the blackmail scene to the elderly man. Note too that he could have arrested him but doesn’t. Lastly, see how the elderly victim also asks Coleman not to ‘kill the sinner,’ ie. not to be too rough on the young boy. They’re all in this world, one not of their own making, together, even if each has to play a designated role not chosen by them. The old man is sympathetic to the young boy, just as Coleman is to him.
The complexity of this representation is underlined in Inspector Coleman’s dealings with his trans informant. See the exchange of glances in the clip above, the softness with which she says ‘Merci Edouard’, but in voice-over on his face. The way they look at each other suggests a tenderness, a hint that there might have been something between them. Note how the camera stays on Delon’s face at the end, a hint of — a smile, something suggesting tenderness or sympathy — appears.
This is underlined in the subsequent scene, where inspector Coleman thinks she’s been misinforming him. He’s no longer Eduard but inspector Coleman, hits her, calls for the cops to ‘get this thing out of here’. She’s no longer a person but a thing, dehumanised. And yet when the cops ask her if he wants them to book her he says, ‘no, take her out’. He could have booked her, just as he could have jailed the elderly gay man previously, but doesn’t. Melville again films this so interestingly, note in the clip above how she looks at him longingly, bewildered. He turns his back on her, the camera zooms in on her face, still expressing a surprise but also longing. The camera then follows her in a fantastic shot filmed from outside as she makes her way through all the various police procedurals and onto the street, the camera getting closer as she leaves the shot. No quips, no wise-cracks, no defiance; a sense of being hurt, misunderstood betrayed, in a world between police headquarters and the street, both filmed as a kind of jail. Our sympathy is with her. Expressing that, and what she might feel, and how what she might feel is a commentary on the film’s world — to not only re-humanise her but for that moment make her the locus of our perception and understanding — is the shot’s sole purpose. It’s beautiful.
It’s a structure of feeling the film shares with Aznavour’s ‘What Makes a Man’:
‘I ask myself what I have gotAnd what I am and what I’m notWhat have I givenBut an answers come from those who makeThe rules that some of us must breakJust to keep living
UN FLIC is full of such extraordinary scenes. My favourite is that of Delon, cigarette dangling, stopping to play the piano. Deneuve steps out to look. He’s the object of her gaze but it’s her the camera lingers over. She catches his eye. He smiles knowing that she’s been looking. A third person (Richard Crenna) enters and he’s called away. He blows her kisses. She does the same. But she’s already betrayed him. All this smokey perfection wafts through on a gentle jazz piano, sound and image masterfully conceptualised by Melville. It’s hard to think of who and what’s more perfect: he, she or the direction that’s orchestrating all of it.
The reason the scene above fascinates me is the gun in the bed, as potent a metaphor for noir as I’ve seen, here encouched in an ambivalence created by the doubling/reflection, distorted and partial of the mirror, the role play, the dialogue. She’s betraying him. Does he suspect at this point? Does he care?
Deneuve is a cold-blooded murderess. Delon lets her go, just as he let the gay man and the trans woman go. But here it’s not sympathy, or understanding so much as his feelings for her, which take precedence over her actions and the law. This film, all tinged in blue filters is all about that moral ambiguity.
I love the scene above where Paul Weber (Riccardo Cuciolla) the former bank manager turned bank robber is allowed to commit suicide. There are parallelisms and foreshadowings here. Paul’s wife (Simon Valère) is the third blonde in the film, the only law-abiding one. Melville does a wonderful thing with lights when they are alone together in their flat, the wife turning on the light to try and find answers, the husband turning them off to block her; this is later reversed. In this scene Inspector Coleman allows Paul to commit suicide, just as he’ll do later with his friend (Simon) who he shares Cathy (Deneuve) with.
In the middle of the film, there’s a superb heist, where Richard Crenna steals a suitcases full of drugs and escapes via a helicopter. It’s a dazzling scene, a cinematic tour de force practically no dialogue, no music, very suspenseful, and it’s a clear influence on the helicopter scene in Mission Impossible, though the latter is in a different, more spectacular mode and a much louder tone, a different type of tour de force but a tour de force nonetheless.
It’s a truly great film, the above merely a hint of its pleasures an complexities. It was also Melville’s last.
Michail J. Glass and I discussed it previously on a podcast here:
José Arroyo
