A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, September 23, 2018

Le Deuxième Souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966)

Lino Ventura in Le Deuxième Souffle
Gustave "Gu" Minda: Lino Ventura
Commissioner Blot: Paul Meurisse 
Paul Ricci: Raymond Pellegrin
Manouche : Christine Fabréga 
Jo Ricci: Marcel Bozzuffi 
Inspector Fardiano: Paul Frankeur 
Antoine Ripa: Denis Manuel 
Alban: Michel Constantin 
Orloff: Pierre Zimmer 
Pascal: Pierre Grasset 

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Screenplay: José Giovanni, Jean-Pierre Melville 
Based on a novel by José Giovanni
Cinematography: Marcel Combes 
Production design: Jean-Jacques Fabre 
Film editing: Monique Bonnot, Michele Boëhm 
Music: Bernard Gérard

I have to admit that I didn't pay a lot of attention to the plot of Jean-Pierre Melville's  Le Deuxième Souffle, other than to sort out the major relationships among the characters. And I think I'm right about that, just as I think it's foolish to try to unravel the plot of, say, Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). Because the point is not what story Melville (or Hawks) is telling us, but how he's telling it. It's a film full of ironic twists, starting with the jailbreak scene that frees our protagonist, Gu. He and one of his accomplices make a leap from a roof to a facing wall and land just short enough to find themselves clinging to that wall. But the third accomplice leaps well across the gap. We think he's the one who made it to the other roof with room to spare, except that there's no "other roof" -- it's a sheer wall, as we discover when Gu and the other man rappel down the far side and find the third man fallen to his death. And so the film goes, with Melville undermining our expectations at every turn. When Commissioner Blot arrives at a crime scene where a man has been murdered, we expect the standard interrogation of witnesses. Instead, Blot, jaded by too many such crime scenes, tells each of the witnesses what lies they are about to tell him and lets them go. Even the big set piece, the elaborately planned platinum heist, undermines our expectations because nothing goes especially wrong. There is one innocent guy who arrives on the scene, but he's neatly dealt with. Usually, in big thriller heists, there's a major screwup that causes the thieves to come up with a Plan B, but not here. The big screwups come when the crooks have to deal with sharing the loot. There's also a witty setup for the confrontation of one of the conspirators with several others, in which we see him case the joint and plant a gun on top of an armoire. Then we see another conspirator find and remove the gun. We expect the guy who planted the gun to get shot when he goes for the hidden gun, but it turns out that he's anticipated this move and has the element of surprise on his side after all. So it goes throughout Melville's film, which is sometimes seen as a story of "destiny, death, and bleak existential choice," full of "elemental concerns."  It may well be that, but it's also a kind of very dark comedy. There are also scenes that I cherish for their slight absurdity. After being badly beaten by the cops under the direction of Inspector Fardiano, Gu is confined to a hospital bed under guard. When a pretty nurse comes in to check on Gu, the guard follows her out into the hallway, giving Gu a chance to rip out his IV and get the jump on the distracted guard. Standard thriller stuff, but I was amused to notice that the nurse was wearing high heels. I doubt if French hospital nurses have ever made their rounds in Louboutins, so it's possible to think of this as a kind of gaffe on Melville's part, but I rather suspect that he wanted the nurse to look as sexy as possible and couldn't care less about verisimilitude. In short, he loved movies more than he loved realism. For all its existential subtext, Le Deuxième Souffle is a movie movie.