Reviews

LE CERCLE ROUGE
Jean-Pierre Melville
France, 1970

Film history is traditionally dichotomized into Lumière and Méliès. These turn-of-the-century Frenchmen, credited as two of the founding fathers of cinema, represent the twin poles of filmmaking possibility. Louis and Auguste Lumière, they of Arrival of a Train and Workers Leaving a Factory, are designated the first of the realists, and their follower Georges Méliès (A Trip to the Moon) the originator of the fabulist impulse. The Lumière / Méliès split pits the cinema of real life against that of the imagination. And yet, the division is never quite that simple; some of the Lumière films are carefully scripted and planned for effect, and much of Méliès's work is a sort of "documentary of the conditions of shooting," to borrow Jacques Rivette's phrase.

These notions are crucial to any discussion of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle rouge, because Melville is remembered today (if at all) as a precursor to the burgeoning French New Wave, an acolyte of the American noir directors whose work flooded France in the aftermath of WWII. As such, Melville is placed firmly in the dreamers' camp, having created, in this film, Bob le flambeur, and Le Samourai, a world of unflappable close-lipped gangsters in trenchcoats and the hard-bitten policemen who chased them. Melville's films are seen as an offshoot of American noir, with Gauloises and Citroens replacing Marlboros and Chevys as symbols of local hipster authenticity.

And yet, on viewing Le Cercle rouge today, long after the New Wave has come and gone, what is striking about the film is markedly different from what reputation leads one to expect, and assigns much of its charm to its realist affinities. Alain Delon plays a just-released ex-convict who meets up with escaped prisoner Gian-Maria Volonte. The two enlist the help of ex-cop Yves Montand, an alcoholic with advanced delirium tremens. Andre Bouvril is the harried police officer, aging and lonely, who is dedicated to capturing the gang. Within these rigidly traditional plot points, Melville takes a surprisingly fresh approach to the threadbare material. In Le Cercle rouge's opening scene, Melville's camera zooms out from the train compartment in which Volonte is being transported by a policeman, placing them within the context of an enveloping exterior darkness as the train rumbles through the night. Returning inside, Volonte lies in bed and stealthily removes his manacles, waiting for the appropriate moment to kick out the compartment window and leap to freedom. This sequence is Bressonian in its depiction of the lone figure's place in the universe, and its patient attention to the detail of escape owes a great debt to A Man Escaped. Already, we are worlds away from the universes of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing. The reference to Bresson is not to be taken lightly; the master's position in between the realist and the fabulist is the ground on which Le Cercle rouge is constructed.

Melville's realist streak manifests in the characteristically French regard for the most mundane (and fascinating) of everyday activities: the world of work. Where American films have always elided the thorny complexities of work, casting its characters in professions strictly depicted offscreen, the French cinema's strongest suit has always been its steadfast fascination with the workplace. From the barge workers in Vigo's L'Atalante to Virginie Ledoyen's waitress in Jacquot's A Single Girl, work has been a central concern of French filmmaking. Le Cercle rouge allots the majority of its screen time to its adventure-film narrative, but its heart is the 30-minute silent bank robbery. It is in this sequence that the relationship between the realist and fabulist tendencies is clarified, namely being an abiding interest in How Things Work. Most of Le Cercle rouge is lazily unconcerned with its relationship to an exterior reality; it is not a realistic policier á la The French Connection by any stretch of the imagination. The protagonists are stylized personae more than anything, a series of indicators of Cool rather than unified personalities. Any film released a scant two years after the turmoil of May '68, in which criminals stroll the streets of Paris wearing jacket and tie, is one willfully separated from the realities of political discourse. The heist sequence, however, circles the formalist Melville back to the place where realism and formalism intersect. During the heist, Melville's characters only communicate by hand signals; a fact jokingly alluded to by the investigator visiting the crime scene, who designates the perpetrators as "not much for talk." Henri Decae's camera watches three experts of their profession do what they know best, and a fascination with the techniques of their trade is in evidence. Entrance is gained, security guards neutralized, a ballet-like avoidance of the alarm triggers is evinced. This scene is like a short cinematic essay on the work of robbery-its skills, attitudes, implements, clothing. What fascinates Melville is less the transgressive nature of the act than the workaday aspects of getting the job done. The sensation of steely professionalism is maintained throughout, with the one deviation from the latter being Jansen excitedly taking his gun off its tripod, and shooting the safe lock freehanded. This sudden impetuousness only serves to underline Melville's primary interest in the nature, and psychology, of skilled work. The heist sequence implies that Le Cercle rouge could just as easily centered on a group of expert mechanics fixing an especially pesky Renault.

Le Cercle rouge pays repeated tribute to the fabulist mode of French filmmaking, from the opening Bresson reference, to the New Wave cars and clothing, to the winding staircase in the fence's lair, so reminiscent of a similar room in Ophuls' The Earrings of Madame de... And yet, even in a movie as dedicated to the fantasy life as Le Cercle rouge, the everyday realities maintain a central presence, in the form of working life. Criminals are merely another class of workers, and work is, ultimately, what French filmmaking has always understood best.
-SAUL AUSTERLITZ