Movie : Le Doulos, or: The cruel, labyrinthine inner circle of crime
Link : Le Doulos, or: The cruel, labyrinthine inner circle of crime
Le Doulos, or: The cruel, labyrinthine inner circle of crime
Le Doulos (The Finger Man) (1962)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
***SPOILERS***
From the very get-go of Le Doulos, Jean-Pierre Melville attempts to erase very notion people held about Bob le Flambeur and the French New Wave it helped energize (starting with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless). Melville loved American cinema—in particular the crime noirs of the 1930s and 1940s—but that love came in various forms. While Bob le Flambeur was his loving ode to the clammy Parisian streets, Le Doulos is a slap to the face to Bob’s style—quite literally. When Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) walks about Maurice’s (Serge Reggiani) apartment as he questions Thérèse (Monique Hennessy), the romantic Melville is present. Silien plays a sweet jazzy tune, gets comfortable, eases Thérèse into the conversation, almost seducing her…and then slaps her across the face, immediately jolting the viewer into this new world. We are succumbed to the entire painstaking process: he ties her to a radiator, tightens a belt around her neck, stuffs a napkin in her mouth, and after a quick whiskey-sippin' break, throws water on her limp body and smacks her across the face once again. Much like Silien’s capricious personality, Le Doulos will continue to be a labyrinthine tale of trust and honor—a mish-mash of both the expressionist and realist filmmaker that bookended Melville’s historic career.
Keeping true to his expressionist side, Le Doulos is heavy on blatant symbolism and revealing shadows through carefully placed lighting. The opening shot features Maurice walking down the street as the camera follows, slowly coming forward until prison bars flood his face. Immediately a sense of entrapment and calamity surrounds the story, indicating the happy-go-lucky days of Bob le Flambeur are gone. Smoke pours from mouths, cigarettes and sewer vents, fittingly clouding the air for this cloudy and perplexing tale, indicating the amount of gunfire that will ensue. Instead of sidling its way into the characters’ live—as seen in Melville’s later films—the irony is heavy-handed, brutal and blatant. “Tragedy is the immediacy of death that you get in the underworld,” Melville said at the time—it would seem delicacy was in short supply.
As a result, Le Doulos isn’t nearly as emotionally piercing as Army of Shadows, but Melville's convoluted poem to film noir finds power in its storytelling. If The Big Sleep’s lackadaisically messy plotline and Reservoir Dog’s earnestness made love, Melville’s Le Doulos would be their bouncing bundle of joy. We are constantly kept in the dark about Silien’s allegiance, guessing up until the very end…and not really buying it. But hey, who cares, since coherency was traded in for sensation early on. Melville didn’t build his story on cogency of plot, but instead on the treacherous environment surrounding his characters, the power struggle between cops and criminals and the emptiness resulting from dealing in crime.
The power of a death Le Doulos (which occurs six times at gunpoint throughout the film) holds the immediacy Melville spoke of, much more so than the dramatically strewn-out deaths of Bob le Flambeur. Maurice walks into a man’s apartment after a prison stint. In a drawn-out power play, Maurice engages the man in conversation, gains his trust, and even pretends to leave at one point, only to be called back. He weasels his way into borrowing a gun, which he uses to shoot the man. Melville places Maurice in front of the camera when he tells the man his fate, facing the audience. He may as well be breaking the fourth wall: he’s fooled the viewer just as much as he’s fooled this man. The man falls over, bringing the table with him and hitting the hanging light fixture. The lamp sways back and forth, clouding the dead body and Maurice’s attempt to clean the crime scene in both light and dark. Footsteps are heard outside, but only exist to build tension, not to interrupt and manufacture a sense of thrill. Instead it’s real, direct, and, well, “immediate.” Much like the incessantly barking dog crippling Maurice’s robbing of a safe, Le Doulos’ environment is utilized less for effect on the protagonist and more for its foreboding and unrelentingly fierce personality. It’s much more independent than the Paris of Bob le Flambeur, introducing yet another two-faced character into the mix.
Strange, since Melville said of his tale: “All characters are two-faced, all characters are false.” It’s a bold statement, but one that accurately captures the mindset surrounding Le Doulos. Silien says he wants to live in a town without crooks or cops—basically pairing the two. While the film very much depicts the power struggle between cop and criminal, at no point is either side perpetuated as a savior. They merely go about their work and achieve their goals by any means necessary. They deal in death and allegiances, often overlapping the two in selfish convenience. It takes away the sole attachment we held with Bob of Bob le Flambeur and replaces it with a multitudinous tale full of unlikable characters looking to succeed. We’re never asked to choose sides, but simply bask in the development of these men’s proceedings and the meticulousness involved in coming out on top.
During an eight-minute uncut sequence, several cops take turns attempting to penetrate the impenetrable Maurice. We see the power play struggle once again. Two cops surround Maurice, trading off questions. Maurice walks away as the camera whips around, only to find the cops on either side of him once again. Maurice’s perverse and detached nature builds the frustration on the police’s part. Jump cuts string the action together, but never detract from the prolonged, thorough and repetitive atmosphere of interrogation. All of it comes at the masterful hand of Melville, who culminates such a sequence with a revealing mise-en-scène, placing each cop throughout the room in his own position. They line themselves to the back of the room, all facing Maurice with his back to the camera in an ambiguous standoff that does nothing to build the plot, but instead molds these men’s personalities, the complexion of their work and the trying relationship between them all.
Much like Bob le Flambeur, the crime world is a man’s world. Misogyny is brimming with life throughout Le Doulos, which favors neither the men nor women of the film. A man’s profession is his concubine, leaving his actual doxy to smolder in the meadow. In Le Cercle Rouge, men are crippled by the distance of romance, which is burdened by their life of crime—it’s a mutual detachment shared by men and women. Silien loves Fabienne (Fabienne Dali), but as seen in Le Samouraï, she takes a backseat to his profession. When he meets Fabienne in the club, he discusses work—she discusses love. Ready to run away with Fabienne, his final act is undercut by the bipolar informant that exists within, creating enemies on not two, but three sides of the equation. Silien’s ego is put on display as he is shot, calls Fabienne on the phone and says he won’t be “coming home.” He then turns to the mirror, adjusts his hat, and then loses it as he falls limp to the floor. Even during his most trying moment, where his life and vision with Fabienne is slipping away, the unrelenting desire to remain “cool” in the face of your opponent takes adherence. The mere act of outplaying your opponents once again holds importance as Fabienne’s future is left in question. Women sacrifice themselves for the men of Melville’s films, but the men only sacrifice for themselves.
And while Melville is adamant in depicting the harsh lifestyle of a gangster, he’s not subject to a bit of poetic symbolism. Maurice looks into a broken mirror at the beginning of the film, which splits his face into two. Silien, on the other hand, looks into the mirror upon his death, face full and undistorted before keeling over. While the characters are revealed to be charlatans through Le Doulos’ own perplexing story, these images speak volumes about the profession, not the plot. Maurice is a sad old man, bent out of shape and gripping onto any allegiance he can handle. Silien plays the field, outsmarts his opponents and lives life to the fullest. When he dies, he dies with grace. His hat rolls away, paired with Melville’s earlier close ups of Silien willingly removing his hat at a check-in counter. In this moment we find Silien content with both his lifestyle and his fate. And also in this moment, we’re not asked to sympathize with or relate to Silien, but understand the grueling nature of a gangster’s world. Much like Le Cercle Rouge’s incessant “red circle” metaphor, this small community of petty thieves and their chasers is a never-ending disarray of obedience, death and betrayal. It’s not pretty. It’s not desirable. But goddamn if it isn't exhilarating.
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