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The Möbius strip of noir ambiguity, as shivery and tortuous as can be. (The destabilizing stance is stated early and simply: "I don't like easy setups.") Jean-Pierre Melville starts with a reverse tracking shot through a sprawling passageway, in and out of the shadows, punctuated midway through with a brief upward tilt and capped with a slow, granular zoom. The veteran burglar (Serge Reggiani) is out to jail to ponder his reflection in a cracked mirror, "nothing left inside." A stark composition illuminated by a solitary lamp post receives the loot (jewels from the Mozart Avenue heist), a makeshift map describes it as "terrain vague." A diagram of betrayals, arrests, vendettas and deaths follows. "Mourir ou mentir," the core of gangland decorum, derived from the Hawks-Huston-Dassin school and cut by Melville into an adamantine construction. Jean-Paul Belmondo enters as a trench-coated silhouette, a floating figure split between the fellow thief and the police commissioner (Jean Desailly). His fedora is part of the uniform, adjusted calmly in the midst of violence ("Now be reasonable," he whispers to the mauled moll tied to a radiator). Sleek murkiness is the mood, as befits a story told twice, first as a snarl of tangled subplots and then as an explanation that elucidates the title. Details exude strangeness: A mural of an antebellum steamboat dominates Michel Piccoli's nightclub while Yankee cars are too bulky for Parisian streets in rear-projection shots. The famous long-take at the police headquarters rotates left and right to trace the warring lines of thought, and is taken up by Fassbinder (Love Is Colder Than Death). The collapsing screen from Les Enfants Terribles figures suggestively in the final shootout, where the concept of underworld honor is reduced to a fallen chapeau. Cinematography by Nicolas Hayer. With Fabienne Dali, René Lefèvre, Marcel Cuvelier, Philippe March, Carl Studer, and Monique Hennessy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |