Some Notes on Le Cercle Rouge

[Cross-posted from The Blackboard and Confabulation.]

(1) I adore Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows and Bob le Flambeur. I've read the interview book Melville on Melville, too, and I just love the guy.

(2) After watching Le Cercle Rouge, I read all of the comments and reviews at IMDB. I agree with all of the positive sentiments, and all of the negative ones. So what do I think of this film?

On a first viewing, I would have to say that it is a "bad great film." (Since at least three of namesake Herman Melville's novels are "bad great novels" -- Mardi, Pierre, and The Confidence Man -- maybe Jean-Pierre would not be displeased by this categorization!)

(3) Just because the film is aesthetically brilliant in certain ways -- which it clearly is -- doesn't mean that it gets an automatic pass on conventional flaws. The screenplay (one of Melville's few solo, non-adaptive writing credits) is a Swiss cheese of plot holes and implausibilities. There is no character depth or consistency.

(4) I will confess to a certain immunity to heist films in general. How many successful heists have there been in modern history -- three? It seems a flimsy basis for a genre.

Has any viewer of any heist film ever been emotionally invested in whether the heist comes off? Watching heist films is more abstract than reading most philosophy.

(5) Alain Delon's deadpan in this film conveys nothing to me -- sorry, Alain! I know some viewers find you mesmerizing. The other four leads -- Gian Maria Volonte, Yves Montand, Andre Bourvil, and Francois Perier -- are all brilliant, although Montand is asked to cover transitions that no actor should be expected to handle.

(6) Montand's hallucination of vermin must have been a hard scene for the actor to film. Like, yuk.

(7) I love Bourvil's relationship with his three cats. (Bourvil died shortly after filming, at 53: a shame.)

(8) The film is very long and very slow, and most genre fans, other than, perhaps, contemplative Gallic genre fans, would be bored out of their ever-living minds. Is there a market for an existential Ocean's Eleven with Buddhist leanings?

(9) Henri Decae's color cinematography in a very cool palette is sensational, reason enough for any cineaste to see and treasure the film.

(10) The ending, c'est magnifique; it almost makes up for any other flaws.

POSTSCRIPT: Re (4), here is Will Straw: "...the rise of the caper film will serve partially to divert the crime narrative...in the direction of more abstract, mannerist games...It might be argued that the form of the caper film is itself geometrical and, in that sense, abstract..."