Siddatha Gautama, 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."
For my birthday present this year the bf has gone and bought me the box set of the films of the French auteur Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973). A name associated with the French New Wave and Neo-Noir. His work is heavily indebted to the Hollywood gangster movies on the 30s & 40s.
So the other night I watched, for the first time, what is probably Melville's best work, for which he also wrote the script, 'Le Cercle Rouge' of 1970, a thriller - 'un film policier' as Melville himself described it - set in a contemporaneous France; the action moving slowly through a wintery nation from Marseilles, to Burgundy, and then on to Paris. In places there is snow on the ground. The film starts as a double manhunt: Corey (Alain Delon) is being pursued by organised crime; Vogel (a feral-looking Gian Maria Volonté) by the police under the command of Le Commissaire Mattai, played by Andre Bourvil (aka 'Bourvil') in his penultimate film role. That parallelism of the hunters is, I think, important here. By chance, or the hand of fate, the lives of these two criminal fugitives cross and the film begins its metamorphosis into a 'heist movie'. In Paris Corey and Vogel are joined by the former police officer Jansen (Yves Montand) an expert marksman. There is a sense in which in which the three criminal protagonists un-self themselves: Corey on release discards the photos of his former lover, Vogel sheds his handcuffs and escapes the police in dramatic fashion; and in perhaps one of the most striking scenes in the whole film Jansen goes 'cold turkey' and finds new purpose. As one critic has said they become 'new men', sort of floating untethered figures, without apparent ties of family or past. Apart from a cursory glance at the menage of Corey and Vogel in Paris, the only domesticity we witness is that of Commisssaire Mattai, who has a small apartment on the entresol, or mezzanine, of a typically 19th century Parisian apartment block. Otherwise there is nothing superfluous, little in the way of score and as I have noted little or no back-story; for instance we have no idea as to the reason for Corey's imprisonment or why Vogel was been taken to Paris by the police. Both are unimportant in the economy of the narrative. The result is an unusually spare film; cinema in a particularly 'pure' form.
'Le Cercle Rouge' is also a film of immaculate stylishness. One feels, for instance, that there is hardly a shot that hasn't been considered deeply, and carefully. Over all, colours are muted; greys and blues predominate and red is rarely used and then its presence on the screen is parsimonious. Paradoxically, this limited palette does not (always) produce drabness - there is a constant intensity of vision. Perhaps in this controlled use of colour there is a nod towards the colour films of Alfred Hitchcock. The interiors - those created for the film - are of a high level of sophistication. Dress is fastidious. Suit and tie, trench coat are the order here - the influence of Hollywood. Perhaps they should be seen as a uniform or the equivalent to the suit of armour. Credit must be given here to the Production Designer Theobald Meurisse, Set Decorator Pierre Charon, and the cinematographer Henri Decaë.
The French writer (and friend of Melville) Philip Labro wrote with an enviable and great stylishness of the Melvillian aesthetic thus: "Melvillian is what is told in the night, in the blue of the night, between men of law and men of disorder, through looks and gestures, betrayals and friendships given without words, in an icy luxury that does not exclude tenderness, or in a grayish anonymity which does not reject poetry."
One way of understanding the narrative structure film is as a game of chess between the gang and the authorities - it may be purely coincidental but as Delon leaves a billiard hall in Marseilles, where, incidentally, he has given a couple of goons a good going over, he passes a sign that reads "Cercle Phoceen d'Echecs". What are to make of this? Is this the only time that the word 'Cercle' appears in the film?
Melville fought with the Resistance during WWII, adopting 'Melville' as his nom de guerre in honour of Hermann Melville. He said of that time: "The best years of my life were the war years. When courage was a virtue. I'm ashamed of it, but I liked the war. The rare moment in a man's life when one encounters virtue. It's the career officers who do not hesitate, sometimes, to confront unlawfulness in order to save their honour." I believe he felt the lack of purpose in those Post War years - the 'Trentes Glorieuses'. (Is there anything in the fact that this film appears to end of that period?) And there is too an echo of that purposelessness in the character of Jansen, the lost former police man, heavily dependent on drugs/alcohol. There is a sense in which Melville's films are not only a way of dealing with those war time experiences; but partly, one supposes, of re-living those years if only in a vicarious manner.
This film is about masculinity and is concerned almost entirely with the realm of men. (No woman speaks, or even holds the screen for very long.) Melville is clearly fascinated about the 'hero' - the trope, or even archetype, of the solitary man without past or even, perhaps, future who acts in a manner beyond the ordinary. Oddly, perhaps, he makes Corey, the career criminal, the repository of the heroic. Ultimately, this film, a lament of sorts, is not only about the death of the hero but the end of the heroic as a phenomenon destroyed by the mundane little police man with the pet cats.
* It was watching Bourvil in 'La Grande Vadrouille' (1966) playing opposite Louis de Funez and Terry Thomas that inspired this discovery of Melville.
** "Est Melvillien ce qui se conte dans la nuit, dans le bleu de la nuit, entre hommes de loi et hommes de désordre, à coups de regards et de gestes, de trahisons et d'amitiés données sans paroles, dans un luxe glacé qui n'exclut pas la tendresse, ou dans un anonymat grisâtre qui ne rejette pas la poésie."
Le Cercle Rouge
1970
Director Jean-Pierre Melville
Cinematogrpahy Henri Decaë
Producer Robert Dorffmann
