Tag Archives: Jean-Pierre Melville

Un flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

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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

Pour la peau d’un flic/ To Kill A Cop (Alain Delon, 1981)

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The more I view of Delon, the more impressive he becomes. In POUR LA PEAU D’UN FLIC, he directs as well as writes, produces and stars. He’s no Orson Welles. The film is but efficient fun. But he’s a lot savvier about driving a film to success than Welles ever was, and this was a big hit.

The film is a very cinephile one, with references to Cukor and his  HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS and LES GIRLS. We also see posters for DESERT FURY, THE BANDWAGON and many others. The most interesting aspect of the film is that it is already evidence of a certain playful postmodern turn.

George Cukor, connasse!

The film is a traditional polar based on a novel by Jean-Patrick Machette, just like TROIS HOMMES À ABBATRE, so there’s crime, and corruption, money laundering and drug deals. But here the darkness of TROIS HOMMES À ABBATRE is leavened by a comic tone. We see the kinds of quip-after-a-horror that we’d only see later in American cinema, with Schwarzenegger as the most famous practitioner.

It’s very self-referential of the genre and of Delon’s own star persona; Mireille Darc, his current girlfriend, makes a cameo and is insulted by a driver calling her by the name of oneJean of her films – LA GRANDE SAUTERELLE (above); Annie Parillaud, his future girlfriend, tells Delon how much more elegantly Belmondo reacts to pain (below).

The film also evidences the beginnings of a change in form that would be exacerbated through the eighties, not so much here by the way it intersperses the action (though that too, see below), but by the deployment of a soundtrack score (Crystal Gayle, Neil Diamond and many others, with Oscar Benton’s Bensonhurt Blues becoming a big hit), that requires a different kind of incorporation into the narrative and into the action. It’s a very enjoyable and interesting film.

The film is dedicated to Jean-Pierre Melville

José Arroyo

Ritrovato Lockdown 2020 – Day 3

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A discussion on watching and experiencing Ritrovato 2000 digitally — an account of the advantages and disadvantages — as well as a discussion of the films available on Day Three: I’m no Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933), When We Were Kings (Leon Gast, 1997), I cento cavalieri (Vittorio Cattafavi, 1964) , documentaries on Jean-Pierre Melville, Voker Schlöndorff, as well as the day’s Bologna shorts. Today we also went off-piste but aligned with the program and discuss Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Death of a Bureaucrat (1966) and Yuzo Kawashima’s wonderful Suzaki Paradise: Red Light (1956).

https://soundcloud.com/user-766042506/ritrovato-lockdown-2020-day-3

The day’s Bologna shorts can be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfisn1S_r-c&fbclid=IwAR3lzjdFYr5-sMPV-wpc0TjUG-AQqL8X0jR8kBKVb_Fd64mEGewzJ0TEWVU

The essay Richard discusses, ‘Paradox in Project-based enterprise: The Case of Film’ can be accessed by clicking above or through here: Paradox_in_Project-Based_Enterprise_The_Case_of_Fi

Listeners may also wish to read Geoggrey Gardner’s excellent assessment of Melville, Le dernier samourai which can be accessed here:

I also blogged on several Kawashima films when they were being screened on MUBI, and they can be accessed here:

Sun in the Last Days of The Shogunate

Hungry Soul Part 1:

Hungry Soul, Part II

Burden of Love

The Balloon

Till We Meet Again

Our Town

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 224 – Le Cercle rouge

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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: 223 – Army of Shadows

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

Jean-Pierre Melville draws upon his experiences in the French Resistance for 1969’s Army of Shadows, which depicts an ensemble including Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret and Paul Meurisse working to disrupt the Nazi occupation of France, rescuing Resistance members from captivity, operating safehouses… and killing informants.

Army of Shadows‘ view of the Resistance is far from romantic, showing the ordinary people who comprise it being driven to extreme measures in the cause of remaining hidden and evading capture, and the threat of capture and death hanging over them at all times. We compare it to The Great Escape, a caper in which prisoners of war work towards a big victory – there’s nothing of the sort in Army of Shadows, the Resistance only ever staying one step ahead of the Nazis pursuing them. Resistance itself is the victory, and it comes with costs.

We think about continuities between this film and Melville’s other work. The isolation felt in Un flic and Le Doulos comes through here, the Resistance members needing to work together but constantly suspicious of one another, as anyone could turn informant; emotional connection is a danger, as it can be used as a thumbscrew. But the film depicts the courage of the Resistance, the inhumanity of the situations into which they’re forced, and elicits a range of feelings simultaneously. It’s a complex, intelligent, essential film.

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

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 222 – Le Doulos

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

We visit another Melville, 1963’s Le Doulos, about a network of criminals searching for an informer in their midst. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays his thief with such assuredly French swagger that it’s no wonder why Quentin Tarantino names this film as a significant influence, though we also pick up on the story’s similarity to Reservoir Dogs, in particular the botched robbery and snitch mystery.

The film has clearly been preserved beautifully, the crispness of the images on Mubi’s stream simply breathtaking. As with Un flic, we consider the characters’ alienation, emphasised here through composition and framing, and their decisions, including the idea that all these men try to do the right thing by their particular code.

Despite looking for things to like, Mike is ultimately nonplussed and a little bored by Le Doulos, preferring, on reflection, Un flic, while José, as ever the spirit of sunshine, beams with praise for it. We can at least agree that it looks fabulous.

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

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 221 – Un flic

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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.

 

Bob Le Flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1956)

 

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An achingly romantic and effortlessly cool gangster film. A voice-over narration at the beginning leads us into a world of night just before the dawn, that moment where the night is over, the nightclubs close, the prostitutes go get a bite to eat on their way home, and cleaning ladies, already late, race to work. Some people have jobs, some people don’t have a bed to sleep in and must improvise, perhaps with a willing American sailor. On one side is the heaven represented by the Sacre Coeur church, on the other, the hell which is for some also a little bit of heaven, represented by the neon lights and easy sex of Pigalle, where Bob lives, with a wonderful view of the Sacre Coeur from his living room window, a metaphor for the film as a whole.

We see nightclubs, with drinking, dancing and gambling. We hear jazz. Sex is sold to get by, but in an easy way, without the film getting all judgmental about it; which is not to say that the film offers no judgment. The lower depths has its own ethics. About the worst thing you can be is a squealer or a pimp. But the film complicates even this: you can squeal without knowing it. Being a pimp doesn’t mean a girl won’t have sex with you for fun or even marry you later, after you quit the profession, and sure to ruin your life just as you ruined so many before.

Diagonals:

Bob le flambeur seems to take place in a liminal world of complex relations that call on the past, on many lives already lived and unknowable except to those who lived them: on bonds of obligations — and affections — where betrayal in some is as certain as loyalty in others. It’s a film of romantic attitudes, of stances not very cool boys would like to aspire to, of sex and death and jazz. The links between this film, Le Samourai and Un Flic are direct: the underworld, the jazz, the nightclubs, the solitude, the elective affinities, the love that kills and the more solid affections that last…at least before the final shootout.

The film has a wonderful sense of place, of mood, of compulsion, and feelings that are understated but strongly felt. If the story is about the acceptance of existential ache, the way it’s told is formally dazzling and playful: the irises in and out, cutting through vertical or horizontal wipes, a jump cut, beautiful purposeful camera movement, and lighting that shimmers. It’s like the past and present of film technique effortlessly deployed in the service of the story. One notices how many of the camera set ups are on precise diagonals. It’s telling that the most extreme and beautiful close-ups in the film are at the very moment of unwitting betrayal that sparks the denouement (see above). It’s a film I never tire of, currently on MUBI.

With Roger Duchesne as Bob, Isabelle Corey as the young woman on her cups, Guy Decomble, the impatient schoolteacher in 400 Blows, plays a police inspector friends with and possibly indebted to Bob. The music is by Eddie Barclay and Jo Boyer and the great cinematography is by one of the greats, Henri Decae.

 

José Arroyo

Delon+Deneuve=Perfection

Delon, cigarette dangling, stops 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 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.

 

José Arroyo

GWTW in L’Armée des ombres/ Army of Shadows

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For Gone With The Wind fans: There’s a lovely scene in L’armée des ombres/ Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969) where two heads of the French resistance — Phillipe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) and Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse) — are in London for a meeting and they end up at the pictures watching Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, USA, 1939). As they come out of the cinema and onto the street, in probably the most brightly lit moment in the film, with the GWTW billboard shown in what looks like a brilliant Technicolour palette,  Jardie says, ‘For the French the war will be over when they can read Le Canard enchaîné and see this marvellous film’. Once again entertainment, bright light and brilliant colour signifying the utopian hopes of a grey, war-torn London in a film about shadows, armies and resistance to existing realities.

 

 

José Arroyo

Le chat (Pierre Granier-Deferre, France, 1971)

le chat

A film that makes one re-think notions of good and bad in cinema: On the one hand, Pierre Granier-Deferre is such a heavy-handy director,  with the conceptual and symbolic dimensions of Le chat so underlined and over-signalled: birds fluttering outside windows, sirens circling, golden youth of long ago seen through hazy irises in flashback; the little house surrounded by wrecking crews turning the old world to dust; garbage trucks regularly reappearing at their front door, perhaps to pick up the wreckage of the protagonist’s lives: there are times where one can’t control the giggling (see the trailer posted below). On the other hand, any director who can get actors to do what Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret do here, alone and together, deserves all the praise there is. They are so gobsmackingly good — so electric – and the roles they play so great — offering such scope and variety of human character and emotion, and changing through time to boot — that one can only offer admiration and gratitude.

Julien Bouin, a retired typesetter, has been married to his wife Clémence (Simone Signoret) a former circus worker for over 25 years. He now can’t stand her. Everything she does irritates him. Why, she asks? Is it cause she got old and fat, cause she drinks? He doesn’t know. All he knows is that one day he stopped loving her. Because of that, she now hates him too. They shop separately at the same shops, keep their food under lock and key in separate cupboards, cook different dishes in the same kitchen, sleep in the same room but in different beds, do little mean and spiteful things to each other. Every day.

 

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Gabin’s Julien on the left; Signoret’s Clémence shut out of his life and thus a reflection on the lower right hand side of the screen.

Gabin plays  Julien as quiet, all closed-in; neat, carefully dressed. A mild-mannered man who does things carefully, systematically but who won’t be pushed to do what he doesn’t wants to. He’s a man who takes pride in doing things carefully and well. Also, he still needs to love; and not the kind of physical love that one can get anywhere either but an outlet for real feeling. He finds it in his cat. It drives Clémence mad that a cat who neither needs it nor appreciates it becomes the recipient of the love Julien should be bestowing on her. She tries to shoo the cat away, attempts to lose him in the supermarket. But no, he returns to steal the attention, the caresses, the love that rightfully belongs to her. So, one day, she kills the cat….

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Julien spying on Clémence

We know Signoret was a great beauty. She’s someone who did speak many languages, and we can believe she plays the seven instruments Clémence claims to be able to. And we can understand the bewilderment, anger, fury that this little typesetter not loving her incites. We see the defiance in every glug of whisky, the determination in the speed with which she manouvers her bad leg through the shops, no limp is going to hold this woman back: the Chinese silk robe in the loud red of someone who demands being noticed. The cigarillo on the side of a mouth. Only the loss a her husband’s love could lead her to crocheting with the fury of someone who wants to commit murder. But the film underlines one can’t hate that much without it being overlaid by love: Signoret communicates the tenderness beautifully. Gabin also.

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Clémence once had an exciting life she gave up for Julien

Le chat beautifully conveys a gamut of human emotion – characters who feel that much is Simenon’s gift to the filmmakers; it is fitting that he is billed alongside the ‘monstres sacrées’ of french cinema and above the title of the film . The director’s gift to the actors is to give them the space to be these people and to showcase them properly for us. Then the actors…well. Watching Gabin and Signoret together play this couple is like watching two great opera singers duet in a Verdi aria: raw, vivid, fine, delicate, explosive…. And watching them seems to me to be essential to anyone who wants to know what great acting in the cinema can be; they bring out areas of human feeling, emotion and experience that lesser actors don’t even known exist.

In the interview that accompanies the Studiocanal DVD, Granier-Deferre speaks about how the producers had not wanted Signoret. Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’armée des ombres, her previous film, had been a failure, and she was (most unjustly) being blamed for it. They went through all the other names of fancy actresses and finally Gabin asked Granier-Deferre: ‘you’ve really got your heart set on that Signoret?’ ‘Yes’. He calls the producer and says ‘If Signoret is not in it, I don’t do the film’. ‘Six hours later I got Signoret,’ remembers Granier-Deferre. Good thing he did too. Because Signoret and and Gabin are the only reasons to watch the film; they make one feel it’s essential viewing; and it certainly is to fans of Gabin, Signoret, Georges Simenon or anyone who’s interested in seeing great acting in the cinema.

 

José Arroyo

 

 

Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1967)

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‘Alain Delon ne parle jamais si bien que quand il se tait’/ ‘Alain Delon never speaks so well as when he’s silent’, François Mauriac, Le Figaro littéraire.1

le samourai
Spanish poster outside the Cine Doré

Le Samouraī is all slate-grey sadness edged by Courrèges-like white modernist elements and encased in lazy jazz. Plus Alain Delon in his prime: Gorgeous. I had the luck to see it at the Cine Doré, the cinema where Benigno (Javier Camará) goes to see the silent ‘The Shrinking Man’ in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her and which acts as a metaphor for a loving violation. It’s worth remarking that the Spanish title of Le Samouraï, El silencio de un hombre, which translates literally as ‘A Man’s Silence,’ here markets noir, whereas a woman’s silence, like the women in Talk to Her, women whom circumstance prevent their speaking their truth, would instantly connote melodrama. The connections between noir and melodrama interest me and Le Samourai, like Talk to Her, is mired in muteness.

Delon’s Jeff Costello appears to us as languid loneliness enveloped in puffs of smoke from the first shot and he remains – not autistic, not even impassive – rather recessive, detached throughout. Is it that he can’t speak his ills or that he simply doesn’t know them? No matter, Melville and the film do, and every frame and camera move speaks them. The world of Le Samourai is a dirty one for a professional hit-man who claims some honour. Delon’s Costello is focussed on doing but disconnected from being, yet wanting. He’s desired but unable to reciprocate such longings: desire would imply longing, wanting and indicate a rooted and fleshly existence that Costello seems detached from. It’s a glorious film. Lovely print too. My main visual memory is an image of Delon as Costello, filmed outside his car window, rendered out of focus by fog and rain. The most memorable scene is the last one, where his professionalism battles his honour and Being succumbs to Nothingness.

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Italian poster

José Arroyo

  1. Cited in Bernard Violet, Les mystères Delon, Paris: Flammarion, 2000, p. 188. Translation my own.

 

 

Le Combat dans l’île/ Fire and Ice (Alain Cavalier, France, 1962)

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Screen Shot 2013-12-12 at 13.30.52Jean-Louis Trintignant and Romy Schneider dazzle in Le Combat dans l’île, their first film together. It’s a political allegory played out through a melodramatic love story and visualised as a noir. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Clément, the son of a rich industrialist who’s involved with a crypto-fascist revolutionary group that plans to assassinate a left-wing politician. Schneider is Anne, his wife, a foreigner and formerly an actress, ignorant of her husband’s doings until the maid finds a package in the closet that turns out to be a bazooka.

Clement doesn't like Anne talking to old pals, particularly when they're black and in showbiz.
Clement doesn’t like Anne talking to old pals, particularly when they’re black and in showbiz.

The film reminded me of Ascenseur pur l’échefaud/ Lift to the Scaffold (Louis Malle, France, 1958) in its spare compositions, low-angle shots on people, wonderings through Paris, acute evocation of mood; and also in the close-ups on faces, the use of silence, and even the way the score is used (though here its mostly Mozart instead of Miles Davis). Both films convey a loneliness, a desperation in love and a quest for meaning that can be characterized as existential; and both convey a textured intensity of feeling that nonetheless seems overhung with ennui. I wasn’t surprised to see Louis Malle listed as producer in the credits.

Screen Shot 2013-12-12 at 13.31.29Romy Schneider is at her most beautiful and touching in Le Combat dans l’île; but then, I seem to feel that each time I see her. She’s exquisite here, still with a trace of baby fat but already seeming simultaneously transparent and mysterious; and capable of expressing a great range of emotion with delicacy and feeling. Le Combat dans l’île was her first film in France where she was to make her home and do her greatest work. Her Anne is extraordinary in that she’s able to convey the extrovert’s life one associates with an actress, her knowledge that her husband is shutting that life down, making it smaller, her love for her husband, and, when he beats her, her fear, hurt. and yes, arousal. Schneider not only succeeds in getting an audience to understand her Anne, but also, whilst invoking admiration for her beauty and skill as an actress, simultaneously incites a feeling of protectiveness towards her character. We understand and are with Schneider’s Anne.

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Trintignant matches Schneider and is to me the revelation of Le Combat dans l’îsle . He looks very young here and very attractive. There are moments when he comes out of the darkness and into the frame where the lighting highlights long eye-lashes and a full lower lip. He’s short but wiry and gives the impression of being quietly coiled but primed for violence. His political fervor is rendered as an arousal brought on by a feeling of mastery that also helps to explain his relationship to his wife.

The first time we see Clement hitting Anne before sex
The first time we see Clement hitting Anne before sex

There’s a scene mid-way through the film, when Anne and Clément are in the woods, which beautifully illustrates this sudden burst into the unexpected: Like most scenes between Clément and Anne, it is  characterized by a hint of violence that is also a hint of sex, and by a mutual affection that nonetheless victimizes her. It’s like they both find that danger sexy, and maybe for the same reason — the clarity of his dominance;. However,  she’s also very much a bird with clipped wings and revolts at the same time as she sumbits.

In the woods, he tells her he’s going to kill the former colleague who’s since betrayed him, and she, aghast at the thought but also at what that might do to them, to her, tells him ‘I wanted to live and you’re killing me. You’re destroying me bit by bit. You’ll end up by killing me too.’ As she says this, he gives a kind of gleeful smile, not at the thought of doing so, but because he finds such power exciting; it makes him feel alive. Trintignant then chases after her  nuzzling her neck affectionately without letting go of her hold on him, almost as if he loves her so much and is so insecure of his hold on her that he’s got to force it.

These are fascinating and original acting choices on the part of Trintignant and they’re thrilling to watch. I loved the moment where he stares at himself on a knife at breakfast or when he goes to kiss Anne in his final attempt to win her back and tenderly places a fist on either side of her neck before trying to kiss her. One can’t quite decide whether it’s adolescent confusion or underplayed psychosis that Trintignant is intending but these choices vividly convey why Anne continues to fancy him and why she stays whilst also showing how clearly he is capable of killing someone. It’s a great performance, one that makes of Clément a vivid contrasts to Paul (Henri Serre), the other man in what eventually turns into a triangle.

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Clément and Paul are blood-brothers from childhood. The film uses them as structural opposites in the narrative; Clément is short, Paul tall; one lives in the city, the other in an old mill in the country; one is married, one is widowed; one is right-wing, the other at least a democrat. One loses Anne; the other wins her; one forbids her to act, the other provides the platform in which she can shine. It’s too bad that the bad guy is a much better actor. Henri Serre then on a career high due to playing Jim in François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, looks the part beautifully but diminishes his contributions to the film each time he opens his mouth. It’s very easy to understand why in spite of his initial celbritiy he never quite became a star.

The film gets its title from the final combat between Clément and Paul on the island. The battle is for Anne of course but it’s also for a politic, a way of life, and a particular kind of future. I’m not well versed enough in French history  to know what the film is allegorizing though it doesn’t take too great a knowledge of history to note that it’s related to then recent Algerian war,. However, such knowledge is not necessary to appreciate this moody, beautiful film which seems to shape a whole way of life and a set of moral attitudes out of shadows and light; and the way that that light hits fog, fire and ice, in the country and in the city.

Le Combat dans l’îsle is a film of the nouvelle vague by one of its lesser lights (I’d never heard of Alain Cavalier before this). It references Godard and À bout de souffle/ Breathless directly when Clément goes to find his wife at the ‘hôtel de Suède’ room no. 12. It also references Truffaut through the casting of Serre. Pierre Lhomme, who’s work here is so great also worked with Jean-Pierre Melville on L’Armée de ombre/ Army of Shadows (which would have been such a great title for this film had it not already been taken). But these are peripheral reasons to see the film.

Le Combat dans l’îsle deserves to be seen for  the beauty of its images, the intensity of the mood it creates, the economy with which the two assassinations are depicted (a lesson to any young filmmaker in how to do very powerful scenes on the cheap), the extraordinary performances of Schneider and Trintingant and the complex and exciting depiction of sexual attraction.

Aside from some of the voice-over narration, so typical of noir, my only complaint with Le Combat dans l’îsle is the knowledge that if Clément’s politics had been left instead of right, it would have been Trintignant rather than Serre, in the final clinch with Romy; and who wouldn’t have wanted that? Yet, if that is so, what does it say about the representation of politics in cinema?

José Arroyo