on cue
by Douglas Messerli
Jean-Pierre Melville (screenwriter and director) Le Cercle rouge
(The Red Circle) / 1970, USA 1993
It is a somewhat shocking that Melville's
great detective-gangster film did not get its USA premiere until 23 years after
its French opening. So many similar but lesser films—including the entertaining
The Hot Rock (1972)—might have learned a great deal from Melville's
masterful direction. Like many a heist movie, much of Le Cercle rouge is
devoted to the clever tactics of its robber-heroes, Corey (Alain Delon), Jansen
(Yves Montand), and Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté).
But Melville takes his work much further by exploring, at least for the
first half of the film, their abilities to outwit the police and others who
might wish to stop them, while also taking us into the minds of their pursuers,
particularly Le Commissaire Mattei (Andre Bourvil).
Much of the entire film is shot in silence, so much so that Le Cercle
rouge might almost have been a silent film with just a few story board
titles. Indeed the film begins with a kind of story board to explain its own
title:
Siddhartha Gautama, the
Buddha, drew a circle with a piece
of red chalk and said:
"When men, even unknowingly, are to
meet one day, whatever my
befall each, whatever the diverging
paths, on the said day,
they will in inevitably come together in
a red circle.
Buddha said nothing of the kind, but
Melville's fiction is perfect to establish from the very beginning that fate is
at the heart of his tale. No matter how hard the men at the center of his story
try, no matter how clever they are, how blessed or damned may be their lives,
they will one day meet their fate.
Accordingly, we see the film from the very beginning less as an adventure the
likes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (filmed a year earlier) than
as a stunningly beautiful playing out of these men's destinies.
Each of them is somehow charmed, intelligent—even Mattei admits that
about Vogel—but doomed, which, in turn, despite their embracement of evil,
makes them sadly appealing. We watch them play out their fates with the same
kind of impassion with which they treat their victims. Vogel shoots down the
petty criminals about to kill his new "friend" Corey with the kind a
cool cruelty that one might devote to killing a cockroach or silverfish found
in the bathtub. In truth, I become far more emotional about that bathroom
activity than he is with humans.
We
are, however, free to admire this sinister trio simply because we know, just as
Corey knows as he chalks up the red circle at the end of the billiard cue, he
will one day lose. Indeed, he does, admittedly, lose the game a few moments
later when Rico's men discover him at the billiard hall.
That is not to say that Melville's "heroes" are necessarily
admirable. Each lives a life of almost utter misery. Corey has just been
released from five years in prison, Vogel has just escaped from a train taking
him to prison breathlessly outrunning squadrons of police, and Jansen, a former
policemen, is suffering from the DT's. But then, none of the policemen seem to
live particularly harmonious lives either. The Chief of Police (Paul Amiot) is
a bitter paranoid, convinced that "All men are guilty. They're born
innocent, but it doesn't last."
Mattei, Melville suggests through his immaculate dress and behavior, his
lonely pleasure of three fat cats, and the several rings he wears—which he
cautiously removes before his final meeting with the Chief of Police—is gay.
Not that he has any time for sexual encounters. In fact, none of these men have
time for sex—heterosexual or homosexual! There has perhaps never been a film
that so utterly removed from the female sex. Only one woman plays any part in
the action, Ana Douking, described as the "the old girlfriend of
Corey," who lies in bed and hovers about Rico's bedroom door when Corey
appears to demand money. She has no lines, and Corey leaves photographs of her
on the prison desk from which he retrieves his other possessions. The only
other women who appear in the film are a bartender and the chorus girls, who
ridiculously sing three numbers in Santi's resturant/bar. The red circle, at
least in Melville's vision, is a male only club, a world for Clydes without
Bonnies.
Henri Decae's photography, moreover, portrays the world they inhabit in
dreary, muted colors. It is cold, it rains, it snows. Paris never looked so
unpleasant—except in the beautifully lit-up jewelry store, shining with
diamonds, emeralds, and rubies. You can well understand, given the emptiness of
these men's lives—in their lack of sex, money, food, drink (Jansen has gone
sober), without even Mattei's beloved pets—why they are drawn to those shining
jewels. And they will do nearly anything to capture those lit up tokens of
wealth which might give them the possibilities of a life they now live without.
It's interesting, in passing, that this film—so different from Eyes
without a Face—was also chosen by Pedro Almodóvar for inclusion in the 2011
AFI Fest. Unlike the other film, Almodóvar mentioned, this did not particularly
influence his current The Skin I Live In. Yet there is commonality; just
as the woman in the Franju film, the three robbers must cover their bestial
identities, hiding their faces with masks.
Like dancers, tight-rope walkers, perfectly-timed performers, the three
mount stairways, climb through ceilings, cross buildings, miraculously cut open
windows, skillfully circumvent protective beams, and shoot out other warning
devices, scooping up a suitcase of the baubles with such success that they
cannot even find someone to serve as a fence.
Forced to turn to the mob, these men have clearly been led back into the
red, the bloody world which they have helped to create. In his own way, Mattei
is their perfect match. As skillfully as they have been able to complete their
heist, so does Mattei manipulate his informers, picking up the young son of the
mob-involved Santi on a trumped up marijuana charge. The only flaw in his plan
is that the son, just as the Chief has argued for every man, is truly guilty;
he has been selling pot and attempts suicide when the police turn away from
questioning him. But the ruse still succeeds; Santi must play along if he is to
free his son, turning into the informer he insists he will never become.
One
of the most remarkable scenes in the film, and one that suggests that Corey and
Vogel have grown closer in their days together, is the moment when Corey takes
the elevator down from his flat, the bag of jewels in his hand, to deliver them
to the head of the mob. Melville's camera follows Corey down, panning up to
Vogel waiting in the apartment. Again, it moves down with Corey, and up to
Vogel, the latter positioned atop of Corey. Clearly the image is sexual, but we
recognize it primarily as a linking of the two; Vogel is troubled about Corey's
next step. Something is wrong, and he knows it. He picks up the rose—another
kind of red circle—which has identified Corey to the mob connection in Santi's
restaurant.
His
attempt to save Corey by rushing into the mobster's villa, demanding that Corey
take the bag and run, results in his own death as well as Jansen's (awaiting in
the car) and, ultimately, Corey's. All three are killed on the run, and Vogel
can painfully report to the Chief, the lives of at least these three guilty men
have come to an end.
Los Angeles, November 7, 2011
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November
2011).
