UN FLIC (aka DIRTY MONEY, 1972)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
Starring Alain Delon, Richard Crenna and Catherine Deneuve
This was Melville’s final film and perhaps the coldest, both
visually and emotionally, of all his crime pictures. As with the director’s most well known film,
the highly influential LE SAMOURAI (1967), UN FLIC is American film
noir as seen through French eyes. Ostensibly a heist film–with echoes of the director’s earlier and far
more accessible BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1955)–UN FLIC spends most of its running time
detailing the machinations of a small crew of Parisian thieves led by Richard
Crenna. Initially, the film’s title
character (Delon) gets only enough screen time to let the viewer see how he’s
been broken and demoralized by his mind-numbing job, but gradually the balance shifts and we see that
Delon is a sort of zombified doppelganger to Crenna’s untouchable
criminal. The mirrored pair share a
lover (Deneuve), and the three often converge in a nightclub owned by Crenna’s
character, but the cop and the thief barely acknowledge one another and seem
more like two sides of the same coin rather than two separate characters. One half expects a Lynchian/Fincheresque
finale where the two characters are revealed to be the same person, but
following the conventions of film noir, we all know that a
bullet will eventually serve the same purpose.
UN FLIC has been photographed almost entirely in shades of
blue with occasional, light accents of green. The appearance of any other primary color seems to be more of an
accident than an intentional decision. The film’s low budget probably prohibited complete control over the visual
palette, but the stark set design and meticulous attention to detail help to
create a hermetic environment that is as stark and cold as in any other film
I’ve seen. This level of stylization
alone makes the film worth looking at, but I did have many reservations about
the script.
The picture starts with a brilliantly constructed and
flawlessly executed heist scene. Crenna
and his accomplices stake out and gradually enter a bank in a remote seaside
resort community. It is Christmas Eve
and the rain beats down on the men as they make their way one by one into the
bank. The entire heist plays out in real
time with barely a single word of dialogue uttered and with the crashing waves providing
the only musical accompaniment. This sequence is the film’s highpoint and unfortunately everything
afterwards comes as something of a disappointment. Delon’s disconnected and
detached cop is less interesting than the plight of the thieves and his scenes
often feel very far away from the heart of the film, as cold as that heart may
be.
More disappointing still is the fact that the thrills of the
opening bank robbery sequence never come close to being matched at any point
during the rest of the film. Crenna’s
gang attempts a daring drug rip-off that involves a helicopter and a speeding
train, but this time the real-time action falls flat and quickly becomes
tedious. The meager budget apparently
didn’t allow for a train or a helicopter, so much of the sequence is depicted
using unconvincing miniatures that would barely pass muster in an Antonio Margheriti picture. The ineffectiveness of this
scene is compounded by the fact that it never really pays off in any way, and in
the end, seems rather arbitrary. Stylistically, it’s simply a carbon copy of the opening sequence and
narratively it serves only to bring Delon’s cop a little closer to the
action. It’s a bit pointless on both counts.
Michael Mann’s HEAT (1995) uses a very similar structure,
with very similar characters, but manages to pull off the story arc with far
more success. Mann’s opening heist is
exciting and tense, but his central action sequence manages to up the ante and
still remain an organic part of the screenplay. By contrast, Melville’s train robbery seems like a clumsily inserted
set-piece, and it can’t all be blamed on the toy helicopter. Mann was also able to retain the existential
qualities of his characters and still make them sympathetic, or at least
identifiable. Melville, who along with
Delon made inscrutability a conscious stylistic choice, only offers up “a cop”
and “a criminal.” I’d add “a girl,” but
Denueve’s character is even less recognizable as human than the others. The only face that we can even begin to see
behind belongs to Crenna’s reluctant third man. This approach is fine, but when you’ve already perfected it (with LE
SAMOURAI), anything less seems like a disappointment. Somehow Walter Hill managed to pull off this
trick with THE DRIVER (1978), but here Melville is eclipsed by his own shadow.
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