"People will do the wrong thing, they always do."

After being blown away by Army of Shadows, I couldn't resist exploring more of Jean-Pierre Melville's filmography, which brought me all the way to the end of his career, to his final film, the modestly named Un Flic ("a cop"), about a police inspector and his crusade to uncover the men responsible for a bank robbery. Melville's work has been famously characterized as a cinema of "process", and this procedural cinema fits rather naturally into the genre of the police procedural. Melville loves dwelling not only on the process of exciting things, like gangsters planning their crimes or police officers trying to find them, but also on the process of much more mundane activities, like getting dressed or boarding a train or even unlocking and opening a door.

Perhaps the epitome of this comes in Le Cercle Rouge with its famous 25-minute heist scene, but there's another great example here where a man drops from a helicopter onto a moving train, collects an item from the train, and returns to the helicopter. Melville shows the entire process in meticulous detail, down to a moment where the man pauses while changing his clothes after landing on the train in order to comb his hair so that he'll appear as if he's been on the train all along and hasn't just arrived by helicopter. It's tempting to walk through this whole scene in its entirety because it's pretty easily my favorite part of the movie, but even though there aren't any real spoilers in it I'd rather preserve the novelty of it for anyone who hasn't seen the movie.

This highlights what I love about Melville, namely his penchant for letting things play out without dialogue whenever possible and instead let the images speak for themselves. This results in stories that are inherently cinematic, even when it might be to their detriment, such as the overuse of cliched convenient exposition newspapers. This cinematic sensibility is grounded in character and plot, and Melville uses his continuing study of masculine communities and men's personal and professional relationships in the world of the police (a reversal of his usual focus on gangsters) to show how the other side of the familiar dichotomy of law and crime rely on similarly tangled webs of brotherhood and betrayal.

Jean-Pierre Melville | France