Jean-Pierre Melville’s
directorial control over Le deuxieme souffle sometimes seems to border
on the supernatural, to be drawing from a liminal state of watching and waiting
and calculating, one in which normal, law-enforced ethics are replaced by what
might very loosely be termed “honor among thieves,” a label with bottomless layers
of underlying complexity and subtext. The names of the main adversaries, career
criminal Gustav Manda (Lino Ventura), known as Gu, and police inspector Blot
(Paul Meurisse), evoke an elemental struggle, the “Gu” perpetually threatening
a hole in the societal fabric, the “Blot” the primary means of repair; their
opposition forming a kind of kinship (Blot’s precise early reading of a crime
scene, complete with laconic predictions of what form the noncooperation of the
eyewitnesses will take, is priceless). Gu escapes from jail at the start of the
film, but a fellow escapee is killed during the attempt (and we later learn the
other didn’t do much better); he shortly thereafter kills two thugs who cross
his path, and from there his activities always feel stalked by death, even his
smallest interactions carrying a heightened existential charge. Gu’s twisted
sense of ethics generates some almost deliriously contorted rationalizations:
tricked into naming one of his collaborators and labeled in the papers as a
stool pigeon, he has a police inspector sign an account of what happened, and
then cold-bloodedly kills the man, with no apparent sense that such a venal
action might outweigh the reclaimed reputational virtue. But judgments and weightings are no clearer on the other side of the law: Blot in the film’s
final moments has an easy opportunity to suppress the inspector’s brutally-obtained
confession, but instead ensures it will be made known. Ventura and Meurisse, despite
sharing very little screen time, are among the all-time spellbinding
adversaries, one of several respects in which one senses a path being laid for
Michael Mann’s Heat.
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