Tag Archives: heist

Un flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

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

I know my life is not a crimeI’m just a victim of my timeI stand defencelessNobody has the right to beThe judge of what is right for meTell me if you canWhat make a man a man
The Aznavour version can be seen here

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:

221 – Un flic

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 361 – The Italian Job (1969)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , ,

Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

The Italian Job is a classic British caper familiar to everyone who’s grown up in the UK, so often has it been shown on telly and so embedded in British culture is the iconography of the red, white and blue Minis, the chase through Turin, only being supposed to blow the bloody doors off, and of course, the cliffhanger. Even those who, like Mike, have never watched it from beginning to end, know and love it as an unimpeachable icon of British cinema.

Which may be curious, considering Mike’s dislike of a UK that has left the EU in a storm of angry little Englanderism and British exceptionalism, as that reliving-the-war, one-in-the-eye-for-the-Europeans attitude can be read throughout The Italian Job – but, José argues, it’s a film that conveys affection for the continent, too, in its globetrotting nature and the beautiful scenery it shows off; and after all, its release came just a few years before the UK joined the EEC, which would later become the EU, in 1973. So it’s not quite that simple.

The Italian Job‘s notion of national identity is also conveyed through class, which is clearly delineated here, particularly through its use of Michael Caine and Noël Coward, who each connote specific strata of the class system. Importantly, this is no tale of class warfare – everyone’s in it together for Queen and country, and the gold heist that everything’s leading towards is explicitly given a national purpose. All that gold isn’t being stolen just for fun: who it’s being stolen from and for are key.

While our heads swirl with all these issues and more – including whether the chase is a good as all that, and the sexism of the comedy delivered by Benny Hill’s character – we have a grand old time at The Electric seeing The Italian Job. It falls short of cinematic greatness, but it’s jolly good fun, and those iconic images and sequences, which might only have existed in your mind’s eye for years since you last chanced upon the film on TV, don’t disappoint when you see them once again.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 248 – Inception

Eavesdropping at the Movies, , , , , , , , , ,

Listen on the players above, on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify.

Could we have found a Christopher Nolan film that José actually enjoys? We explore the brilliantly imagined and executed Inception, a heist movie set inside the human mind, talking up the intelligence and creativity with which the central concept is used, the elegant and effective intercutting and structure, and the noirish, expressive romance that underpins the entire affair.

We’ve had some disappointments with Interstellar and the Dark Knight trilogy, but Inception was just the antidote. Boy, are we fired up for Tenet now.

Making spoof Inception trailers was all the rage around the time of its release, and here are the two Mike made:

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 224 – Le Cercle rouge

Eavesdropping at the Movies, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

Listen on the players above, on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify.

We conclude our dalliance with Jean-Pierre Melville with 1970’s Le Cercle rouge, a heist film with an impressive cast of Alain Delon, Gian Maria Volonté, and Yves Montand. We discuss how genre conventions operate in the film – the shortcuts an understanding of genre provides allow details to make the difference, Mike suggesting that it all comes out through character relationships and quirks.

In discussing Le Cercle rouge, we think back on what we’ve learned about Melville’s style, themes and interests. For Melville, emotional attachment is dangerous and makes one vulnerable; it’s a rather bleak outlook, but José argues that his films aren’t without their romantic aspects. Mike remarks upon the way in which Melville’s style has been interpreted and appropriated by the filmmakers he influenced, noting that the vivacity with which, for instance, Quentin Tarantino effuses about Melville is not reflective of Melville’s films themselves, which are slower and more pensive than you might be led to expect. To José, it’s existentialist cinema through and through, and, naturally, he loves it.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 221 – Un flic

Eavesdropping at the Movies, podcast, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , ,

Listen on the players above, on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s final film, Un flic (A Cop), has a bleak feel, its characters isolated amongst harsh architecture and the neverending business of cops and robbers. Alain Delon’s cop follows the trail of Richard Crenna’s thief, whilst handling informants, other cases, and an occasional relationship with Catherine Deneuve.

It’s a film in which feeling shows through small actions, glances, and behaviour. The cop has seen the worst of humanity and carries a weariness with him, but that just makes his capability for generous gestures more meaningful. Mike remarks upon the similarity between cop and thief, both going about their work with a sense of lifeless inertia. We also note the central heist sequence’s clear influence on the climactic set-piece in Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, comparing the ways in which the scenes work and what their intended effects may be, and José comments on the film’s blue-tinged look, something that contributes greatly to its sense of melancholy.

Those of you interested might follow up with Le samourai, Bob le flambeur, L‘armée  des ombres/ Army of Shadows and other Melville films.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 112 – Widows – Second Screening

I drag a somewhat recalcitrant Mike to the cinema for a second go at Widows, joined by Lee Kemp (@leekemp), a Birmingham-based filmmaker and founder of Vermillion Films. And wow, we cover a lot!

Mike and Lee both agree that some of the cinematic technique is distracting on the first viewing, whereas second time round, knowing what to expect, it’s easier to appreciate the art of some shots and evaluate them more intimately. I simply luxuriates even more deeply than before in the visual splendour and tone. We agree that it’s a heist film that isn’t really about the heist, though what we then make of that – how clever we think that is – is up for debate. What isn’t up for debate is the film’s economy, both visually and in dialogue. It’s so, so elegant and deliberate, and that all becomes clear as we compare things that struck us.

The film’s use of the Church comes into focus – morality and God is almost never in question when it comes up, the film instead framing it in political, corporate and corrupt terms. The film equates the worlds of politics and gang crime, one white, the other black, a theme expressed through the two opposing political candidates and their associates.

We take time to consider the similarities and differences between the central female characters; how, for instance, the two black women are members of very different social classes. We praise how the film depicts how they deal with grief, the lack of connection they so desperately feel, and the way it affords each of them their scene to express it. Mike has, since the first podcast, watched the first Prime Suspect (written by Lynda La Plante, creator of the original Widows) and talks a little about it; I find it interesting that an originally British television programme adapted in part by a British filmmaker should yield such a sharp commentary on American society, and in such a condensed form.

We also consider wider questions of how to watch films critically. Mike goes on a brief rant about why the lack of seriousness with which media studies education is still taken has resulted in a world of Trump, Brexit, and fake news. Methods of analysis come in for scrutiny; we mention the video essay series Every Frame a Painting and discuss how one of its episodes in particular, the one on 2011’s Drive, is or isn’t a good example of textual analysis. We discuss the scene in which we see the protagonist’s son’s death; would we have watched it differently ten years ago, when it’s set?

All this and even more in a discussion that’s full to the brim. Mike is begrudgingly forced to concede that he misjudged the film the first time. I love it even more than I thought I could. And many, many thanks to Lee for joining us. And check out War of Words, the UK battle rap documentary on which he worked as executive producer, now on iTunes!

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 107 – Widows

José falls in love with Widows, a portrait of life and survival in modern America in the skin of a heist film. Mike can see exactly why he should love it, but just doesn’t click with it.

Based on Lynda La Plante’s 1983 ITV series of the same name, Widows sees three women lose their criminal husbands in a heist gone wrong, and their attempt to complete their final job with the promise of a big payoff. The film draws parallels between urban gang violence and entrenched political dynasties, complicates the widows’ grief with sex and intimacy, and constructs the potential payoff not as a cause of celebration but as a way out of bad situations. José finds the film a visual marvel, layered and expressive, but to Mike it’s more a reminder of what he loved so deeply about You Were Never Really Here than great in its own right.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 91 – American Animals

 

An imperfect combination of documentary and dramatisation, American Animals gives us a lot to talk about. Its story of four college students embarking on a heist raises ideas of privilege, ambition and hope (or lack thereof), self-image, and above all, masculinity. In its self-conscious invocation of the kinds of films twenty-something white guys adore, such as Fight Club and Reservoir Dogs, American Animals builds a portrait of the modern young man with which Mike sympathises but which José cannot tolerate.

Neither of us finds the film without deep flaws, and indeed we could not claim to have really enjoyed it. But it is valuable and leads to a lively debate. We use the phrase “American masculinity” a lot without burdening ourselves with defining it, and Mike observes that all films with American in the title are full of themselves.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.