When I first saw Claude Sautet’s Max et les ferrailleurs, Max’s climactic act of self-destruction
seemed to me successful as a shocking narrative coup, but not entirely
convincing as character development. On subsequent reflection, I’m still not
sure, but one wouldn’t bother to ponder the matter as much if not for the
surprising richness of what leads up to it. Max (Michel Piccoli) is a policeman
who runs briefly into Abel, an old army friend, a man laboring on the margins
of the scrap metal business (a pretty marginal business in the first place, no
doubt), subsisting mostly on petty theft. Frustrated with a recent spate of
unsolved bank robbers, Max discerns that Abel and his cohorts might be ready to
move up in the crime leagues, and then surreptitiously sets out to help them get
there, working through Abel’s prostitute girlfriend (Romy Schneider). The
scheme works, and Max is credited with an easy score, but then the wheels of
the law move on more heavily and efficiently than he wants them to, prompting
that final outburst. Sautet certainly seems here like an under-appreciated
genre master, pacing events perfectly, and sustaining an intriguing contrast
between Max’s cold, isolated machinations and the rambunctious camaraderie of
the scrap merchants. Of course, cops who exercise blurred ethics in the name of
ultimate order are a genre staple, but Max
et les ferrailleurs finds a particularly compelling, class-conscious way of
interrogating that murky territory. The ferrailluers, it suggests, are really
no more lawless than they need to be to sustain a workable existence, and
perhaps no richer (several characters cast suspicion on Max’s private wealth as
a distorting factor); if they have to be destroyed, it’s primarily in the
interest of warped governing interests. Looked at in that ominous,
politically-charged way, it’s perhaps fitting after all that the ending goes
beyond mere irony, into utter breakdown.
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