Un flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s last film Un flic may not necessarily seem to add much to his filmography: it’s another terse, tight-lipped crime thriller, shot through with isolation and alienation. The film’s primary (and tertiary) interest may lie though in just how far it takes those attributes, seeming to push with chilling certainty toward a kind of vanishing point where people might hardly register at all, except as disillusioned, hollowed-out markers, playing out a pointless destiny. The film features one of the most passionless sexual triangles in memory: Simone (Catherine Deneuve) sleeps with both the policeman Coleman (Alain Delon) and a villainous club owner Simon (Richard Crenna), apparently with the knowledge of both, but Melville makes such limited use of Deneuve that her presence almost seems to pose some kind of puzzle. The film contains several counterpointing portraits of quiet anguish – one of Simon’s partners in crime who’s driven by unemployment, watched over by his anxious wife; a transgender informant who seems to stare at Coleman with unexpressed longing – but they mainly only serve to underline the detachment of the principals. The major wordless set-piece – the daring theft of a consignment of drugs from a moving train – is largely self-contained, with only minimal narrative connection to what comes before or afterwards; when resolution comes, it’s without even a moment of exultation, and the concept of closure hardly comes to mind, partly because of what still hangs (or at least should hang) over Coleman and Simone (he shot too soon and killed an unarmed man; she carried out cold-blooded murder) and otherwise because it’s never clear what exactly was open. Melville’s choice of exteriors – from the most isolated bank to be found anywhere outside a Western; to the modernist exterior of the police headquarters – supports the sense of abstraction; he drains the interior of Simon’s club of any sense of pleasure or eroticism. One certainly wouldn’t recommend the film as the place to begin with Melville; but it’s a disquietingly apt place to end.