Os Profissionais do Crime

Why do I always care about thieves in heist films, no matter how bad they are? As is common in Jean-Pierre Melville's later films, this meticulously crafted crime film opens with a title card that epigrammatically sets out a foreboding epigram that molds ostensible meaning into the action: "A man is given but one right at birth: to choose his own death. But if he chooses because he's weary of his own life, then his entire existence has been without meaning." It's invariably inhibiting to totally apply these fatalistic, existential aphorisms to the films that thus proceed, but they tend to cast a distinct outlook across the film. I'm not so sure that this slow, deliberate caper, or any of Melville's others for that matter, seeks all of the indications of this quote, but its pretext of fate, mortality and grim, solipsistic judgment corresponds with the essential themes of the film.

Like Le Cercle Rouge, Le Deuxième Soufflé is a nominal saga, an antithetical and composite film in which the life seems as if to impose and simultaneously exhale. Ventura's performance is both innate and disciplined by his claustrophobic settings. There are several instances set within moving cars, less to expand the atmosphere than to show the inhibition of the space they employ.

What frustrates and somewhat detaches me however is that Melville never seems to give his characters any involved cognitive measure. They're characterized and assessed by the black and white of their behavior. Gu is a ruthless, intractable and curtailed presence who gains recognition, even from Inspector Blot, another wonderfully named character, played by Paul Meurisse, who respects his deadly actions because he eventually complies with and doesn't veer from his dang "code."

Much of this 1966 cops-and-robbers film can be explained just in terms of its distilled preoccupation with the reference to the conventions regarding the treatment of Chandler, McBain, W.R. Burnett, Jim Thompson, stylish Hollywood crime dramas, and classic American gangster pictures. Melville's films in this mode have the element of photogenics, conformity to modern ideas and models nourished by a shadowy nonchalance and the characters' affectedly memorialized mannerisms. For instance when a dutiful thug prepares to meet the other gang members, casing the place first, but also anticipating the blanket preconditions of the scene. This dogmatic behavior underscores the salutary definitions of these characters, their movements having a textbook role. You can also see Melville's influence on Tarantino's Jackie Brown when the thug is dramatically pre-performing the differing poses of the impending standoff. Also, it's not until Gu changes into clothing more mindfully echoing that of a gangster that he is allowed to free himself from being so secretive and concealed.

The sullen, inflamed and exceedingly conventionalized quality of this typified film conveys Melville's immersion in the downbeat deliberation of the play of loyalty and destined disloyalty. With this transcendent crime film, as per Melville's usual, complete with another great title, Second Wind, Melville pushes the tonal qualities and gray scale of the image to new levels. The movie's preoccupation with issues of fellowship, abnormally all-consuming professionalism, silence, and duplicity reverberates with Melville's own distinction as an egocentric, tight-lipped, fringe-dwelling figure in French cinema, who despite his success never truly declared participation or involvement in any founded generation or evolution of filmmakers.

I don't speak French, but the acting and the subtitled dialog are outstanding throughout.

The plot and each situation, each conversation, is completely credible, and follows naturally, yet not predictably, from what came before.

A note to younger audiences: there are no highly choreographed fight scenes or stylized gun battles (though there are fights and shooting). No throw-away romantic interest. No noticeable special effects. No wisecracking. No mood music telling you what to feel.

So, if you're used to recent Hollywood fare, it may seem slow.

But, to this noir-lover, it feels fresh, yet as gritty as a run-down apartment in a hundred year-old building.

Jean Pierre Melville was an "einzelganger" in French cinema. He did not belong to the Nouvelle vague (although his career took place during the heydays of this movement), but he certainly wasn't a part of the "cinema du papa" (as the nouvelle vague directors derogatory described their predecessors) either. "Le deuxieme souffle" is not the most well known picture from the oeuvre of Melville, but it is a connecting link between the pure film noir of "Bob le flambeur" (1956) and the more abstract (but still film noir) films such as "Le samourai" (1967) and "Le cercle rouge" (1970).

"Le deuxieme souffle" is not noticeable because of an innovative plot. The criminal who comes out of prison and wants to set some things straight and also wants to make one major robbery before he retires, we all have seen it a dozen times before. It is the way Melville tells this story.

One element you can't miss is the way each milieu has it's own code of honor. Gustave Minda (Lino Ventura) is a criminal who doesn't hesitate for a second when the job requires that he has to kill a couple of people ("Le deuxieme souffle" is a very raw film), but he is very anxious not to be known as a talebearer by his "colleagues". On the other hand commissaire Blot (Paul Meurisse) has to deal with very ruthless people, and in a way he understands them and sees through them. When however another commissair uses violent interrogation techniques, he takes measures to keep his profession clean.

Just like in "Le samourai" the opening scene is silent for a very long time. In this opening scene we see the escape of Gustave Minda and two other inmates. The way that Gustave has to struggle to keep pace with his fellow inmates tells us (without the use of a single word) that he is already an aging criminal.

Just like in "Du rififi chez les hommes" (1955, Jules Dassin) the preparations for the great robbery are shown in great detail. During this preparations Gustave has to hide, after all he is a prisoner on the run. Much of the movie is therefore situated in cramped claustrophobic rooms. To juxtapose all this, the execution of the crime is situated in the most open of landscapes imaginable.

I had seen nearly everything that is readily available from Jean-Pierre Melville in the United States by the time I got to Le Deuxieme soufflé, which may be part of why I didn't respond overwhelmingly to it. After such challenging, methodical and precisely existential crime masterpieces as Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, Bob le flambeur and the underrated Le Doulos, this one just seemed to not pack the same kind of punch that the others did. Again, this may be the fault on the viewer for seeing this last among his mostly thriller-oriented oeuvre, but perhaps it's also some of Melville's fault too; again and again, as the dedicated and ruthless auteur that he was (one of the great French directors I would argue), he kept coming back to men in trench-coats with grim expressions figuring out on both sides- criminal and detective- of how to plot the next move or, for the former, how to keep from the fatalism of the plot.

Which, for Melville, is something that comes second nature. The difference, perhaps, in this case is that the length (a whopping two and a half hours, longer than both The Red Circle and Army of Shadows) and the amount of details in the structure of the story (i.e. what happened on such and such a day made this happened could've been snipped, albeit I can't pinpoint to which) bog down some of the more successful aspects to the picture. Which is also to say that for all of its minor misgivings, Le Deuxieme soufflé (or, simply, The Second Breath) is near-classic Melville, with nail-bitingly tense suspense scenes like the opening escape from the prison and the latter heist sequence- somewhat more obvious and less coolly ambitious as Red Circle.

There's the amazing cinematography as well, a trademark of Melville and his crew to make things gritty but smooth in precision and style, and the performances from Paul Meurisse as the Detective (maybe my favorite performance of the picture just for the intelligence he imbues in the character), and Lino Ventura as one of the quintessential Melville anti-heroes, Gu, the convict who wants in on the big 200 million heist. And even as it could be Melville's most "talky" picture after Bob le flambeur (which is relative to how pleasantly light, or how seemingly sparse, his films are with dialog), when the characters speak it's to the point of with some quotable spunk to them.

There's an icy, unspoken angst in Melville's world of criminals, almost questioning but still true to the notion of the 'policier', where you'd want the criminals to get away with it if the detective wasn't so doggone determined all the time. It's another fine piece of film-making from the director, just not an all-time-top flick - more along the lines of Un flic. 8.5/10

Nowadays, films that last more than two hours or even two and a half hours are no longer a rarity, on the contrary, they have become almost the norm. This was not the case in 1966, when Jean-Pierre Melville directed 'Le Deuxième Souffle', a 'film noir' that assimilates and synthesizes the film experiments of the French New Wave, of which Melville was very close, but at the same time has a classic structure and narrative, starting from José Giovanni's documentary novel which it brings to screens (Giovanni also wrote the film's dialogues). More than five decades after its making, the film has a stylish look (perhaps due to the use, for the last time in Melville's career of black and white film) but also a modernity and a cursivity that make it easy and interesting to watch. I didn't get bored at any point and I never had feeling that the movie (which I saw in the full 150-minute version) is too long.

Jean-Pierre Melville addresses here a theme that he will continue in subsequent films and especially in 'Le Samouraï', which I consider to be his cinematographic masterpiece - the theme of the honor code of the mob. Solidarity among those in the dark side of the law requires mutual protection among criminals, including rivals, in the contacts with the law officers and imposes absolute silence even under the toughest investigations. The informers and those who collaborate with the police are, according to this 'moral' code, the lowest human species, and the fate that awaits them is death. The film begins with the escape of Gustave 'Gu' Minda, the main hero of the film, played by the wonderful Lino Ventura, from the prison where he was serving a life sentence. When the police inspector who follows him uses an illegal recording to compromise him, the recovery of his honor becomes more than an obsession for him, more important than love and even life.

This is one of the solid and generous roles in Lino Ventura's career, a role that suits him wonderfully. A few other excellent actors surround him: Michel Constantin, known from many other gangster films, Paul Meurisse whom I knew from the classic 'Diabolique' made a decade ago as a talkative and shrewd police inspector, and Christine Fabréga, whom I did not know until now, takes upon with aplomb the role of the hero's hopeless girlfriend. The cinematography cleverly applies the lessons learned by Melville during his Nouvelle Vague period, bringing to screen Paris and Marseille with their shadows, bars and nightclubs, with jazz music in the background in the style of the American films adored by the young French directors of the period. The arid and spectacular landscape of the southern roads of France is an excellent setting for spectacular pursuits and heists, and we also have the opportunity to see the old port of Marseille as it looked before the renovations that turned it into a tourist destination. 'Le Deuxième Souffle' is an excellent gangster movie, but also a psychological film, accurate and believable in character building, which deserves to be seen for much more reasons than nostalgia.