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Un Flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972/1975): Released in Jean-Pierre Melville’s native France only a year before his untimely death at the age of fifty-five, Un Flic is a sublime swan-song for the French master: an ice-cold, bare-essentials procedural that strips away plot until the only thing remaining is a feeling of frigid despair. The story, which cross-cuts between a group of bank robbers (led by Richard Crenna) and the detective (Alain Delon) assigned to catch them, is pure Melville, but there’s the sense, as the film plays out, that the writer-director could hardly be less interested in forming tension out of standard plot-point suspense. (Even the film’s love-triangle element, involving a mysterious, elusive beauty played by Catherine Deneuve, remains somewhat underplayed and out-of-reach.) Instead, Melville takes to crafting tremendous sequences made up entirely of real-time criminal detail: the film’s painstaking opening robbery, set against an assault of fog, wind, rain, and sleet, is essentially silent, the lack of conversation emphasizing the gloom of the thieves’ profession. Even better is a later set-piece in which a helicopter transports Crenna’s Simon onto a moving train. Melville, who milks the sequence for everything it’s worth, finds mesmerizing cinema in the smallest of gestures: a shot in which Crenna does nothing more than wash his face, comb his hair, and change his clothes is as riveting as any of the film’s more elaborate chases. Even Delon, the iconic leading man of Melville’s Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge, is used more for atmosphere than traditional character-building: he’s not acting so much as he’s simply giving the camera a presence, a breathing, aging entity upon which the film’s overriding melancholy is projected. If Un Flic is ultimately a tad slighter than Melville’s finest works, it’s for a convincing cause: its insistence on stagnation, while circular and one-note, creates a spellbinding effect in which the blues and grays become a source of decaying life. [Tentative Rating: ***1/2]
