Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

May 23, 2003

"When it's hot, play it cool."

Nope, not talking about Andrew Fleming's remake of The In-Laws.

Laconic filmmaker and lying raconteur Howard Hawks loved that line, repeating it relentlessly in his later years. French nouvelle noirist Jean-Pierre Melville acted quietly on a similar impulse. He drew on the iconography of American gangster movies in work such as Bob le flambeur and 1967's Le Samourai (reissued in 1996, but not yet on video), and he's been a great beneficiary of the restoration boom brought on by the DVD format's profit potential. His twelfth, and penultimate feature, the epic of gangster manners The Red Circle (Le cercle rouge) "presented" by John Woo is in distribution around the country. It's courtesy of Rialto Pictures, which specializes in theatrical re-releases of movies like Rififi, which Melville almost directed, Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Jean-Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders.

Men in the rainy city

Melville's movies are hushed, deadpan abstractions of space and gesture, and his blunt, efficient cutting of shootout scenes are among the glories of precise, elegant filmmaking. Men with hats. Men with guns. In Le Samourai, Alain Delon, perhaps that day's handsomest man on earth, swaddled in an immense trenchcoat, hiding deep blue pools of blankness under the brim of a fedora, stares out into the Parisian drizzle through a rain-blurred windshield, inserting keys from a ring until he finds the one that fits.

In Bob le flambeur, a steel-haired, middle-aged, world-weary gambler comes up with the grandest con of his day while cruising the nightspots and fleshpots of backstreet Montmartre, but his moment of deepest melancholy comes from a single gaze upon the bare back of a young girl he's sheltered as she sleeps with his young protégé.

And a bald, stocky Jewish Frenchman, wearing a Stetson and sunglasses at night, barrels his Cadillac convertible down the Champs Elysee in search of diversion. Alain Delon in Le Samourai, Roger Duchesne in Bob le flambeur, the great filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville in life

In The Red Circle, three men are brought together by chance: prisoner Alain Delon, released to commit an intricate jewel heist; fugitive Gian-Carlo Volonte, who hides in Delon's trunk; and a former cop (Yves Montand) with demons to purge. Melville makes their motions quietly indelible, as well as the police, the police who police the police, and the criminals they all must consort with. (Melville even finds a role for his own three cats.)

In Rui Nogueira's long-out-of-print book-length interview "Melville," one of the most amusing oral histories of a filmmaker, the cinephile and director mused, "What is friendship? It's telephoning a friend at night to say, `Be a pal, get your gun and come over quickly,' and hearing the reply, `Okay, be right there.'"

The Red Circle provides a tersely played two-hour-forty-minute flowering of that sentiment. John Woo, admitting the kiss of debt that both he and other filmmakers owe Melville, nods toward its silence. Melville's visual style, restrained, refined, a palette reduced to essential colors and compositions, has been lifted and riffed upon by another connoisseur of the "beautiful loser," Quentin Tarantino. The first time I saw Reservoir Dogs, I was astonished by the dexterity and cleverness of Tarantino and cinematographer Andrzej Sekula's paraphrase through choice of colors, use of space and framing, of the collaboration between Melville and his cinematographer Henri Decae, who shot Le Samourai and Red Circle.

"There is not much dialogue," Woo writes of the film, "and the silence creates a more dramatic cinematic language. By creating a cool, calm atmosphere with immaculate camerawork and precise editing rhythms, his style and message move with his actors as they deliver their soulful performances." Claiming that he learned how to fire a gun and how to teach his actors from Delon in Melville's movies, Woo adds that Melville's themes "embody the spirit of honor, loyalty and tragic destiny among characters played by fate." The doomed romance of brotherhood: you can see why Woo loves Melville.

This cycle of homage is appropriate, perhaps, since Melville, an unapologetic admirer and collector of Americana and American crime movies, took much of his ethos from the gangsters and brooding tough guys in Hollywood pictures of the 1930s and 1940s. Melville and his characters were wont to mutter sour-sweet epigrams about trust and loyalty, like "If there are two of you, one will betray."

Working outside of French studio auspices, building his own facilities, often shooting on the fly on locations, Melville also provided inspiration to the French New Wave, and before that, as he often insisted, his spare style was taken by Robert Bresson. ("I say Bresson is Melvillian, not the other way around.")

"I don't know what will be left of me fifty years from now," he told Nogueira in 1970. "I suspect that all films will have aged terribly and cinema probably won't even exist anymore. I estimate the disappearance of cinema... around the year 2020, so in fifty years there will be nothing but television. [I'll] be happy if I have one line devoted to me in the Great Universal Encyclopedia of the Cinema... I'm not ambitious, I don't want to be something; I have always been what I am, I haven't become anything; but I have always had this feeling that ambition in one's work is an absolutely justifiable thing."

In Godard's Breathless, which homages Bob the Gambler in a couple of scenes, there's also a cameo by Melville, as a pretentious novelist, asked by Jean Seberg, "What is your greatest ambition in life?" "To become immortal," Melville's character postures. "And then die." To be followed a couple months later by one of the inevitable, enviable, contemporary fetishes of a Criterion deluxe DVD edition.

Shelf life

It scares me when art becomes artifact.

In more that one interview with filmmakers, I've seen them describe their burgeoning DVD collections. Some, like the Hughes Brothers, sound like they need a sustained dose of cinephilic Ritalin when they talk about how they assemble scrapbooks of frame-grabs of shots they esteem by other directors. Michael Bay uses his as an excuse to talk about his multimillion-dollar home theater, and others have begun to concede that it feels good, really good, to have a profligate swath of film neatly arrayed on shelves in their home. They may never have time to watch them, you see, but there they are, alphabetized, conserved and, let's admit it, lifeless. (Let us not concern ourselves with those who arrange their Criterion Collection DVDs by spine number; that lasted for all of about eight DVDs in my house.) It's the Pantheon as fetish: Mr. Lubitsch and sensei Kurosawa and crazy-mad Terry Gilliam belong to me.

Of recent releases, the most envy I've heard expressed is over Criterion's indispensable The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, the company's most elaborate box set since Brazil, which collates Francois Truffaut's four features and a short starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as his alter ego Antoine Doinel, shot over a two-decade period. A successful television director I know couldn't excuse the $100 expense for the set, yet it is there, taunting, shrink-wrapped at Virgin or Tower. Even through the cellophane, you can admire a tear-inducing bit of art direction, a replica of a 1950s style suitcase. Open it up, each individual disk has on its cover a folded piece of clothing to match the character's time in life: a shirt, sweater, jacket, or most affectingly, for The 400 Blows, a black turtleneck that the young pup-cum-cur Doinel wears in his first misprisions against the law and with love. With interview extras and other supplements, including Truffaut's 1957 short Les Mistons,  it's an embarrassment of riches, embarrassing mostly because it's impossible to find the time to digest it all. The long-unseen Antoine and Colette is a major eye-opener, and I have to agree with Film Comment's Kent Jones, whose essay in the seventy-two page booklet celebrates the simplicity and precision of its story about post-adolescent Doinel becoming obsessed with a girl he sees at a concert. The choreography of their flirtation dazzles, capturing with "amazing fluency and delicacy," as Jones puts it, Doinel (and Truffaut's) lifelong "burning desire for women." (For Jones' visit with the contemporary Leaud.

Other new releases of note come from every era. I love that Home Vision Entertainment has issued Robert Flaherty's classic documentaries 1934's Man of Aran, the extras to which include How the Myth Was Made, a sixty-minute documentary about the film's making and 1948's Louisiana Story, with interviews with his widow and collaborator, Frances Flaherty and excerpts from rarely seen films. Film history, in my hand, on my shelf, awaiting that weekend when I want to revisit documentary history. (I just don't know when that will ever happen.)

It's also noteworthy that Throne of Blood, Criterion's edition of Akira Kurosawa's dense, thrilling, lyrical adaptation of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" has two different sets of subtitles, accompanied by essays from each translator about their approach. (Donald Richie memorably refers to the subtitler's compressive art as "thoroughly compromised" yet the language he chooses for the short bites of telegraphese in the convention of subtitles must be "scrupulously anonymous.") Will I ever watch both versions? I will revisit H. G. Clouzot's voluptuously human hardboiled 1947 masterpiece, Quai des Orfèvres having already hoovered up the disc's supplement of 1971 television interviews with Clouzot and his main actors.

The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Derek Jarman's Jubilee, described by the painter, gay and political activist, designer, journal-keeper, designer and gardener's biographer Tony Peake as a "somewhat uneasy mix of exuberance and bleakness," offers a snapshot of the mid-1970s English despair, social and economic, that begat punk. (And with a Brian Eno score.) I flipped desultory through the film's chapters, but gobbled up the extras, including selections from Jarman's annotated script, layered with drawings, Polaroids, calligraphed notes, fallen feathers. A lengthy doc, Jubilee: A Time Less Golden revisits the film's making with several of its actors, collaborators and Jarman's friends, including film historian Tony Rayns. (I fear becoming a connoisseur of footnotes.)

Footnotes? Lars von Trier's Medea, (Facets Video), is an interesting footnote in a career that's going to turn out to have more footnotes than a David Foster Wallace novel. Drawn from an unfinished script by fellow Dane and forebear Carl-Theodor Dreyer (whom the puckish Trier claimed to be in daily psychic communication with), this 1987 video adaptation is a grimy mess that makes for a sorry slog, but prefigures some of von Trier's latterday fascination with degraded video and degrading melodrama.

Miklos Jansco's 1974 Electra, My Love, also from Facets, is an astonishment, a seventy-one minute retelling of the classic myth on an open, desolate Hungarian plain, camera in constant motion, seldom cutting, with galloping horseman, nude choruses and fireworks underscored throughout by a tattoo of drums. Even before Electra is pulled from story's past to some sort of present in a bright red helicopter, you're hypnotized. You've never seen anything like it, partly because Jansco's films haven't been available for a long time. But they're a chapter of film history DVDs can do wonders for. While a notable influence on Hungarian countryman Bela Tarr, Jansco's films are more than footnotes: they're ravishing, physicalized manifestations of an inhabited world that could exist only in cinema. Or, with today's art-house economics, on DVD.

 

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