Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/30/19

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

Monday, September 30, 2019

Un Flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

Un Flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

Cast: Alain Delon, Richard Crenna, Catherine Deneuve, Riccardo Cucciolla, Michael Conrad, Paul Crauchet, Simone Valère, André Pousse. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville. Cinematography: Walter Wottitz. Production design: Théobald Meurisse. Film editing: Patricia Nény. Music: Michel Colombier.

It's amazing how hard it is to make Alain Delon look ordinary. In Un Flic, the last film by Jean-Pierre Melville, who made Delon's unsurpassable good looks and cool the essence of Le Samouraï (1967), he's supposed to be a tough, weary cop, a chief of detectives. So his hair is not so neatly combed as usual, he's made up to look a little pale, and there are wrinkles under the celebrated blue eyes. The thing is, however, that Delon pulls the character off successfully -- unlike other handsome actors, he makes us look past the beauty. We see what's going on in his head as he makes his rounds. It's Delon's charisma that justifies the film's title, because in fact the movie focuses more on the robbers than on the cops. (When it was released on video in the United States it was retitled Dirty Money.) The thieves get the film's two big set pieces: the bank robbery at the beginning of the film, and the famous 20-minute helicopter-and-train sequence in the middle, in which Richard Crenna's Simon is put through a hair-raising James Bond-style stunt. The latter scene is preposterous, of course: When and how did Simon and the helicopter guys practice for this elaborate heist, which has to come off without a hitch? But the sequence works in part because the rest of the film is based in gritty reality, such as the bleak off-season ocean-front setting of the opening, with the rows of anonymous modern buildings presenting blank, boarded up windows to the stormy winter sea that roars in the background of the bank robbery. (The sound recording of André Hervée and sound editing of Maurice Lemain deserve special mention.) Un Flic exists in a neverland intersection between actuality and movie artifice, a place Melville visited in almost all of his films.