It’s a bit strange that the title of Jean Becker’s Un nomme
La Rocca takes the form of an assertion of identity, because the character
barely has any coherence at all, beyond what flows from Jean-Paul Belmondo’s
embodiment of him (which is obviously way more than nothing). After an almost
Leone-like prologue, the movie takes La Rocca to Paris, where he effortlessly
muscles in on the gambling and bar scene, shooting one antagonist and pushing
others around like playing cards. That comes to a sudden end after he tangles
with some American deserters and gets sent to jail, not inconvenient anyway as
he’d been musing on how to spring his incarcerated best friend Xavier from
there. The movie spends a while in conventional behind-bars mode, until the two
men volunteer for a land mine clearing team in exchange for reduced sentences,
and events shift into sweaty, stripped-down, existentially-questioning mode,
pushing Xavier in particular to the limits of his tolerance. The final chapter,
a couple of years later, has the men free again, maintaining an apparently
chaste household with Xavier’s sister (La Rocca’s sexual prowess, emphasized
earlier on, is off the film’s agenda by this point) and aiming to buy a farm
property; Xavier taps his old shady connections to get the money, leading to a
final tragedy, and La Rocca barely has any role in this final act other than to
react, lament and ultimately walk away. The movie has a colourful supporting
cast, dotted with portrayals that vividly impact before being summarily swept aside; the opening credits inform us it was shot at the Jean-Pierre Melville
studios, and Becker’s direction sometimes feels Melvillian, although mostly only
to the extent of a style, not a worldview or investigative method. Unless, that
is, in the year after A bout de souffle,
the title somehow means us to reflect on the emptiness of such filmic labels
and narratives even as we succumb to them.
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