Un flic

Un Flic, translated as A Cop, but rather known in English as Dirty Money, is essentially cool guy movie about man's men who are cops or robbers who smoke cigarettes, hang out in bars, do cool poses with guns and wear cool suits. But it is among the cream of that particular crop, and the reason is its stylistic subtlety and storytelling economy. It is not a feature-length music video like the Guy Ritchie films or an epic patchwork of references like those of Quentin Tarantino. It is utterly confident in its simplicity.

Plenty hold that master French crime filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville had reached his pinnacle long before this, his last film, and he definitely did. But Un Flic plays exquisitely with all his signature muteness, austere faces and bleak colors. Cinematographer Walter Wottitz eschews gloomy soliloquies and melodramatic dialogue for his steely color treatment. What few colors that do breeze in appear to exhale from the poignant grays. The characters barely speak, most conspicuously during the movie's twenty-minute intrepid train robbery sequence in which the robber is dropped onto a moving train via helicopter, performs the robbery and gets back on. The film spotlights two strikingly constructed heists, the other one in a bank. The first is the hold-up of an isolated Riviera small-town seacoast bank. Melville painstakingly films the unlawful act, and how it goes awry when a ballsy teller declines to be robbed without a fight.

Melville's moody, idiosyncratic swan song is an ascetic inkling of the young though despondent, headstrong Paris police chief played by a volatile, willful Alain Delon, who is going after bank robbers and a drug-smuggling ring among his everyday quota of crimes to which he has grown apathetic. But these two crimes, as he discovers later on, are link and affect his personal life. The gang leader is indeed his counterpart, Richard Crenna, an underhanded nightclub owner he became acquainted with while having a prevalent liaison with his coldly gorgeous wife Catherine Deneuve. She shows no fervor for either of her lovers, the impervious ice queen. Crenna plays the civil competitor with played by Crenna with the chivalrous air of a frequenter of coffee shops and theatres. Deneuve plays her character as someone not interested in dividing her lovers by good and bad, but by charming or tedious. And Delon remains Melville's trademark tenacious individualist.

It's a dismally ambient film noir with Melville linking his characters to the quiet panorama around them, as it is set in a neon-lit moist city outlook of despairing crooks who are getting old and need one last score to go out with dignity. Police brutality is understood casually as a truth of life, as are double-crosses among thieves. The film is shot in minimalist style, with the dialogue and the sets being scant, but not rawboned. Melville was a man of simple tastes, but idealistic, zealous, philosophical tastes at that. Un Flic, or Dirty Money, held my engrossment all through with a feeling of a dreamlike serenity before the brewing outburst.

Un Flic is a French gangster caper film with many intriguing qualities. Visually, it is really interesting. The color choices demand repeated viewing. I like how there are seldom light colors seen (except for Deneuve's platinum hair and the smuggled cocaine). The muted color scheme generates a lot of gritty atmosphere to help draw you into Melville's nightmarish vision.

The plot is difficult to follow. I'm not really sure about several key points. For example, police officer (chief?) Coleman (Alain Delon) learns the name of the gangster the others had killed in a hospital. From that piece of information, they quickly trap the driver/helicopter pilot at a restaurant? Also, with the physically imposing driver/pilot in police custody, how does Coleman manage to break his spirit sufficiently to nab the rest of the gang? Torture would be needed, but no information is supplied to confirm it was used.

Much has been said about the obviously fake model train and helicopter that Melville shows for the second heist scene. I'm fine with it. (Gosh only knows how much it would cost to lease a train, a helicopter and pilots for a day.) The relationship between Delon's Coleman and Richard Crenna's Simon is a major theme. Coleman is a world-weary and cynical policeman who will employ brutal methods to solve crimes. Simon is an energetic and brave gangster/bank robber. Coleman is more romantically interesting to Catherine Deneuve's Cathy. However, Simon's courage during heist #2 probably wins the audience over. At the film's end we tend to like Simon more than Coleman.

Deneuve's Cathy is one of the richest small roles in screen memory. She's not on the screen for many minutes, but when she is, Cathy is a devastatingly enthralling femme fatale.

For a gritty, Hellish view of police and crime life; with three strong performances; along with a few toy trains and a helicopter, 'Un Flic' is One Crime Flick worth seeing.

Neglected Melville crime thriller isn't exactly good, but isn't bad either -- feels half-finished, more than anything. Crenna and Delon are friends; they're also on different sides of the law, with Delon a cop and Crenna secretly the head of a gang of thieves who specialize in risky heists. On the other hand, Delon is secretly carrying on with Catherine Denuve, Crenna's girlfriend. Plot too allusive for it's own good -- a bit more grounding of the characters are needed, since their motivations as it stands are opaque (why are Delon and Crenna friends? why is Delon carrying on with Deneuve? if Crenna knows, as he seems to, why is he allowing it? what does Denuve think of all this?). Low budget also hurts the movie -- the centerpiece of the film, an elaborate heist on board a moving train, looks phony and very cheap. (This is a rare movie that probably would benefit from a remake). On the other hand, Melville remains a master of gloomy atmosphere, the setpieces more or less work (the opening sequence, a bank robbery in a cold and rainy seaside town, is well done) and the actors all give it their best. Final shot of the movie is very well done.

Career criminals wear fedoras and trenchcoats like its 1945 and they're attending a Robert Mitchum impersonation competition. Rain isn't weather; it's sexytime music for a cocaine heist. The world is covered in an uncompromising azure mist that squeezes the life out of every possibility of beauty, whether that beauty is reaching Catherine Deneuve's white blonde demeanor or an enticingly French city street. A Jean-Pierre Melville directed crime film rests in a middle-ground of romanticization and adamant realism; it climaxes at the nearest sight of a Humphrey Bogart photograph, but it's also interested in telling a story where a robbery can be delivered with seamless perfection ... but that doesn't mean that a pessimistic cop won't catch up with you in the end in a hazardously bloody fashion.

Un Flic is a relatively minor Melville film (especially putting Bob le Flambeur and Le Cercle Rouge into consideration), but it's ravishing all the same. Like the problematic comprehensibility of The Big Sleep, it isn't worried about tight narrative. It's about temperament and atmosphere, and it's safe to say that the ambiance of Un Flic is penetrative enough to make your bones break. There's something uneasy that leaks from the ghost blue of the cinematography and Richard Crenna's depressed eyes; the placid slickness of it all can only reach so far before someone is shot.

Telling the interconnecting stories of a tireless cop (Alain Delon) and a nightclub owner (Crenna) who pulls off massively intricate jobs with big payoffs, Un Flic is squalid enough to make us squirm; criminals walk right under the noses of the police, while the police, as well-meaning as they are, are confined to a purgatory of law-breaking with payoffs that brings no one pleasure. In so many other crime films, there's a notion that once the main villains are locked up, the heroes are left satisfied, ready for their next big adventure. But Un Flic exists in an entirely different universe. The chasing and capturing of criminals is tiring, redundant even. Who is having more fun: the sinners, or the rule- followers?

Initially, the film seems as though it's going to transform into a full- fledged exercise in film noir style. Cigarettes are tossed around, liquor is spilled, and femme fatales are easy to come by. But the closer we get to the conclusion, we begin to realize something: Delon's character, Edouard Coleman, isn't a James Bond or a Frank Bullitt or a Harry Callahan. He is a man, a man who was intrigued by enforcing the law many moons ago but is finally growing restless from the unavoidable sleazy details he sees on a day to day basis. Behind his eyes is a glassy emptiness; if he were to throw away his badge this very moment, what difference would it make?

I suppose Un Flic's melancholy edge is what gives it such a lasting impression. The story is too complicated to easily follow and the style is one and the same with Melville's other films. But that blue, that blue, is disturbing. Unlike black-and-white, it gives reality a grit never seen by the naked eye. Crime doesn't pay and don't we know it, but in Un Flic, even renowned actors like Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve can hardly live in a world this hopeless.

For a police thriller, this movie chose the strange angles of architecture and fashion from which to tell the story. Throughout, the film actively tries to showcase a new, modern France. In the weird opening sequence, we see a sea-side resort with an endless row of brand-new apartment blocks, totally void of human presence in a foul winter-weather. Strangely, from afar, a shop in one of the buildings seem open. Because of the abundant lighting, we might be tempted to think it's a bar, but it's a bank (about to be robbed). The police headquarters is another modern building given lots of camera-attention by Melville, who seems to juxtapose this 'new' France to the old; the contrasts with scenes of the 'old Paris' such as the closing scenes at the Arc de Triomphe are great.

The male characters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time to groom their looks. Both Alain Delon and the excellent bad guy Richard Crenna (Simon) are given lengthy shots showing them combing their hair. They parade around in flawless suits, slick ties, lush bathrobes, gold cuff links. These are sharp dressed men, vain and self-obsessed, misogynist and gay-bashing. The gorgeous can-can girls are there (like in so many other Melville movies) but no-one seems to notice them. Delon manipulates a beautiful transvestite into thinking he might fall for her charms, only to beat her up when she fails to deliver on a promise.

Catherine Deneuve on the other hand seems less well served, sartorially speaking; I was not very impressed with her acting performance in this film, but perhaps my judgment is influenced by the ugly earrings she wears throughout. The closing titles highlight that the black dress worn by 'Mademoiselle Deneuve' was by Yves Saint Laurent. I don't know why this was pointed out, since the dress is hideous. Deneuve's finest moment was when she plays an angel of death, wearing a haute couture caricature of the nurse uniform. Quentin Tarantino must have been directly inspired by this to create Daryl Hannah's nurse look when she is set to murder Uma Thurman at the start of Kill Bill vol 1.

All in all, the plot was not that interesting, but since the male actors were all in terrific form it was a very pleasurable movie to watch.