Un flic

Can a soufflé still taste good, even a trifle underbaked and missing an ingredient or two? The answer depends on the cook.

Late one rainy afternoon, four men rob a bank in the French coastal town of St.-Jean-de-Monts, not without deadly complications. The lead crook, Simon (Richard Crenna), leads a double life as the owner of a French nightclub. One of his regulars is a quiet police inspector named Coleman (Alain Delon). In time, their lines of work will shake their friendship like nothing else, not even Coleman's affair with Simon's wife, Cathy (Catherine Deneuve).

"Un flic" (A Cop), also known as "Dirty Money," is a film about the dehumanizing nature of police work. Coleman is suave but conflicted, willing to slap around a suspect or even a suspected suspect but not so hardened as not to be conflicted about that.

"This job makes us skeptical," his deputy Morand (Paul Crauchet) notes as the pair leave a morgue.

"Especially about skepticism," Coleman replies.

Director Jean-Pierre Melville was a leading light of the New Wave movement, and his commitment to impressionistic pure cinema is on strong display right at the outset. We open on the sound of crashing waves, filling the screen with blue. The car with Simon and the other robbers moves slowly into position. With rain crashing around them on an empty street, three of the four men wordlessly get out in turn to take their positions in the bank.

A short but portentous scene is played out through their eyes. Simon's are committed but apprehensive. The old pro who joins him first, Marc Albouis (André Pousse), reads cool and empty. In the car, a former bank manager named Paul (Ricardo Cucciolla) hesitates while the driver, Louis (Michael Conrad) looks at him hard. You can see the fear in Paul's eyes as he reluctantly leaves the vehicle to play his part.

What is up with this scene? It features four French robbers, only one of whom is actually played by a Frenchman. Here, and in many other ways, Melville was clearly doing things his way, establishing meticulous realism in some scenes only to abandon it in others, most notably in a later train heist which features some fine suspense work but was clearly filmed with models.

The weakest element for me in this movie is not the Tyco episode itself, but how it is integrated into the rest of the film. We have little idea how the train heist is being done, or why it leads to the final act the way it does. Yet its aftermath proves central to everything, by which time Melville is giving us not riddles but koans.

Though employing real locations and real-time sequences, Melville doesn't seem nearly as interested in telling a solid crime story, with motives and meanings laid out. His film, like the dialogue sprinkled through it, remains elliptical all the way through.

"We're doomed victims, the prey of actual pros," is something a blackmailed homosexual tells Coleman, which serves as a kind of motif for the film. I don't think "Un flic" sells the idea as well as it thinks. If Coleman is a victim, it's of his own hard code.

But "Un flic" keeps you watching and makes you think. And while casting an American as the lead crook and another as his key partner seems a strange conceit, dubbed as they necessarily are, both Crenna and Conrad make it work, playing their parts with the same elegant drabness that underscores every scene. Crenna's Simon is one character you come to care about, if only a little. Delon may be a trifle too mopey, but makes for an enigmatic center.

As a crime story, it's pretty decent. As a cinematic tone poem, it's much better.

In Melville's last film, Alain Delon is a cop who pursues a small group of fortyish men who first rob a bank and then later intercept a large supply of drugs en-route to somewhere via a bag man on a train. The bank is beside a ruthless sea and the memorably bleached-out and forbidding opening scene is full of mist, rain, and wind that turn everything a sickly pastel. One of the robbers is wounded and they drive away with him -- a sequence that may have influenced Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs." But these men are as laconic as Quentin's are garrulous.

Nobody is morally pure in this story, or wholly evil. One of the robbers is a bank executive who's out of work and hides his wrongdoing from his worried wife. The cop, Edouard Coleman, whose ride is American, as is the robbers', is involved with crooked nightclub owner Simon's accomplice girlfriend, Cathy (Catherine Deneuve), who helps Simon clean up the mess when the robbery goes wrong. Edouard has to look the other way about her involvement. Her first appearance is ravishing: she slides sideways out of a doorway and pauses, framed there, looking perfectly beautiful. She slowly breaks into a smile as Coleman picks out a jazz ballad on the nightclub piano.

The drug mover who's intercepted is called "Matthew the Suitcase." The operation to steal his drugs is long and complicated and is "Un flic's" "Rififi" episode; it's more absorbing than the manhunt in "Le Cercle rouge," but the several plot strains are a bit disjointed.

Despite the ingenious drug heist, being a cop and being a crook are in a way just a job, a 'boulot' in "Un flic." Delon has some dash and dresses sharply but he lacks the panache of his character in "Le Samouraï." The robbers are dreary, determined fellows without the charisma of Yves Montand in "Le Cercle rouge." They're totally middle-aged and middle-class. This puts them on a par with most of the cops and perhaps illustrates Melville's epigraph, from pioneer French private eye (and former thief) François Eugène Vidocq, "The only emotion men awaken in a policeman are ambiguity and derision." This harmonizes with the viewpoint of the chief of police in Le Cercle rouge who repeatedly insists that everyone must be assumed to be guilty.

While that earlier chief of police worked out of a dark but cozy Victorian office, Coleman is in a bright modern building and has a phone in his car, but his well-lit office has a window on a brick wall. The dull routine of police work is signaled by the verbal rituals of the car-phone calls: His assistant always answers and says, "I'll pass you to him." Coleman listens, then says "Where's that?" and "We're going, I'll call you back later." The words never vary. And this flick about a "flic" never wavers from its economical unreeling that's worthy of the best Fifties noirs, despite being in faded blue-gray Technicolor. Melville got back one last time to the old brilliance. Even if the "noir" isn't quite noir, the mood is right, full of resignation and irony.

The plot doesn't quite parse, but neither did Le Doulos'. If it's true as Jack Mathews of the Daily News wrote about the reissued "Le Cercle rouge" that Melville's crime movies are "really about wearing raincoats and lighting up Gitanes and saying very little while being very loyal," then plot inconsistencies and even visual disparities not withstanding, it's still all good. And even if some of the earlier freshness and pungency were gone, in his last two films Melville showed even greater skill at editing and setting up his scenes. So if not canonical, Un flic is nonetheless another valuable work by this prince of darkness, this splendidly moody minimalist and inspirer of the French New Wave.

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.

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.

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.