Jean-Pierre Melville & Alain Delon: Collaboration as Subversion
This story is part of my weekly “Have you seen …” series where I highlight movies that I think are under-appreciated, misunderstood, or simply worth talking about. New entries are published every Wednesday. NOTICE: Spoilers follow.
We all love a good actor-director team: Scorsese and De Niro, Cassavetes and Rowlands, Quentin Tarantino and a lot of people who would be way less successful without Quentin Tarantino. Entire books could be written on how the interplay between these iconic pairs creates a layer of intertextuality that weaves between different films — so get back to me in a few decades and I’ll show you what I have to say on that subject.
For now, I’d like to highlight an actor-director combo a bit less known, at least to American audiences: Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Delon. Melville is perhaps best remembered today for some of his early work including Les Enfants Terribles and Bob le Flambeur, but some newfound interest seems to have arisen around his later films — three of which star then-sex symbol and monument to inscrutability, Alain Delon.
Melville and Delon’s first two films together, Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samouraï, are both excellent examples of the former’s idiosyncractic take on the crime thriller. One would be forgiven for walking away from either film with a remarkable sense of boredom: both movies, for all of their genius scenography, are paced such that even their relatively brief runtimes can feel inflated.
What Melville’s films gain from this is an effect that many of the same genre lack: precision. Despite his terse attitude towards dialogue, Melville gives more definition to his characters than most directors could ever hope for. Something as a scant as a look or a certain step informs the impressions we end up having of the players in these dramas.
That’s where Delon comes in. As an actor, he is so reticent to oversell his roles that the audience is forced to act like a kind of detective, picking up a crumb from every one of his expressions in the hopes of forming a sturdier picture of the man being portrayed. What could be a frustrating exercise ends up, thanks to the genius of Melville and Delon, being an cinematic experience unlike any other.
To simply focus on craft here would ignore the common threads that the Melville-Delon films share: crime. In Le Cercle Rouge, Delon is an ex-con who’s picked up a tip on how to nail the score of a lifetime, and in Le Samouraï he’s a principled hitman surrounded by armies of dirty cops and two-timing gangsters. Plot descriptions of the two films fall squarely into the category of “bleh,” but anyone who watches these movies will immediately understand that, whatever Melville was going for, it certainly wasn’t cheap thrills.
Both Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samouraï open with fake epigraphs made up by Melville. In Le Cercle Rouge, it’s a plausible sounding Buddhist parable:
“Siddhartha Guatama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: ‘When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever the diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle.’”
and in Le Samouraï an equally criptic quote falsely attributed to the Bushidō, or samurai code of conduct:
“There is no solitude greater than that of the samurai unless it be that of a tiger in the jungle… perhaps…”
The marrying of the French underworld with faux-Eastern mysticism may seem like an odd one, but in the context of these films there is an undeniable synergy between the two. The stakes in both Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samouraï are seemingly low: no big conspiracy, no massive shootout — just a heist and a murder (big deals in real life, chump change in the movie theatre).
Instead, the real struggles are almost metaphysical: the Yves Montand-played Jansen in Le Cercle Rouge only participates in the heist to escape the tortures of addiction and solitude, and in both films, Delon’s character finishes the movie dead at the hands of the law. Melville is asking nothing about jewelry and guns — he’s questioning the value that such a life has to offer, and in turn questioning the value of life itself.
Of course, a shallow reading would simply suggest a pair of anti-crime parables on the part of Melville. Enter Un flic.
In both Delon’s last collaboration with Melville and Melville’s last film before his untimely death, Delon shook things up by playing a police officer in search of a group of bank robbers. Un flic bears a lot of similarity to the previous two films in this quasi-trilogy: an extremely drawn-out train heist calls back to Le Cercle Rouge while, at one point, Delon’s character Commissaire Coleman sees the name “Jef Costello” — the name of Delon’s character in Le Samouraï — scrawled on the wall of a dead prostitute.
Though Delon is clearly the star, Melville still can’t seem to take his eyes off the bad guys: quite a bit of screen time is devoted to the actions of the robbers, leaving Coleman to pick up the pieces afterwards.
To a modern viewer, Coleman is far from an endearing cop lead: he openly courts the idea of torturing prisoners into ratting (and it’s implied he does so offscreen) and threatens to ruin the life of a transgender informant by reporting her to the vice squad. For the vast majority of the film, this can make Delon’s character tough to be around — he’s chasing killers, sure, but the ethos he brings to the job is not an easy one to root for.
The movie’s conclusion, however, calls all of this into question: Coleman, through his brutish tactics and clever planning, has trapped the ringleader of the gang out in the open. The criminal reaches into his coat, leading Coleman to pull out his own gun and shoot him to death. As it turns out, the dead man never had a gun on him to begin with, and one of Coleman’s fellow cops points out that he may have shot the man a bit too quickly — a charge Coleman brushes off.
The film ends with a long, unbroken shot of Coleman and his partner driving away from the scene. Of the original four suspects, one is in custody, one was killed by his partners, one killed himself before arrest, and the other was killed by Coleman. As their police radio rings with an alert of a new case to pick up, Delon’s unmoving, unreadable face beings stares into the mid-distance — it’s a shot composition that oddly mirror the iconic ending of The Graduate, though here the implications may be a bit more dire.
In Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samouraï, Delon doesn’t make it to the end credits — the audience are the ones forced to consider the “point” of it all. Just as in those two films, the criminal in Un flic ultimately fail to get away with it all, but it’s no longer their perspective we’re subject to; it’s the cop’s.
Coleman knows that his efforts to bring justice to the guilty have directly or indirectly killed three of the four men he hoped to serve, and we know that he twisted more than a few arms on his way to doing so.
Melville and Delon had already made two great films that brilliantly questioned the search for prosperity through crime, and they finished off their partnership — and Melville’s career — with one that asked if a violent justice is really justice at all.
