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"Mauvais souvenirs, soyez pourtant les bienvenus... vous êtes ma jeunesse lointaine..." Marching invaders before the Arc de Triomphe, a desaturated epoch, 1942-1943. The civil engineer (Lino Ventura) is an agent for the Resistance, first seen wryly smiling at the Vichy officer taking him to a detention camp. "You do what you can in these lousy times." "Of course." His escape suddenly quickens the adagio rhythm—a knife under the sentry's chin and a race down the street, he catches his breath at the barbershop and gets a shave. "To each his own troubles." A magnificent compendium of Jean-Pierre Melville's themes from Le Silence de la Mer to Le Samouraï, a reverie of dread. Underground, underworld, code names and disguises. The young traitor must be eliminated but the hideout has thin walls, the camera meets the strangled lad's visage frontally, tear-streaked and lifeless. Whistler blues, with a brief Boudin view. The courier (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and the leader (Paul Meurisse) are brothers but also strangers, the organizer (Simone Signoret) is the secret life of a Lyon housewife, steely but for the sentimental detail that does her in. Glimpse of Clouzot's talent agency (Quai des Orfèvres), London sojourn with a tremor of the Blitz and a screening of Gone With the Wind. "The war will be over for the French when they can see this great movie." The fatalism of valor and the valor of fatalism, torture and anonymous death are the outcome. Frames within frames: The window of a RAF plane, the slot on a cell door, the dark widescreen of a bunker tunnel filled with machine-guns and condemned men. "Curieuse mathématique," the Melville way, the most haunted of films. Frankenheimer's The Train lays the groundwork with the evocation of national art, Tavernier's Laissez-passer completes the equation with the link to cinema itself. Cinematography by Pierre Lhomme and Walter Wottitz. With Claude Mann, Paul Crauchet, Christian Barbier, Alain Libolt and Serge Reggiani.
--- Fernando F. Croce |