Film review

  • Le Doulos

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean-Pierre Melville (1963)

    It begins with a somewhat unwieldy explanation of its title:  ‘doulos’ is slang for hat, which, in criminal vernacular, means ‘one who tries it on’, which, being interpreted, is an informer.  (Or words to that effect.)  It ends with a shot of a hat, fallen from the head of the ‘informer’ character Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) as he collapses to the ground, dead – the way nearly everyone else ends up in this policier, which Jean-Pierre Melville adapted from a novel of the same name by Pierre Lesou.  Although the brisk storytelling and the visual scheme of Le Doulos reflect the influence of American film noir, Melville seems at pains to make immediately clear that this is also a distinctively French and therefore intellectual piece.  Those crime dictionary definitions are followed by a legend on the screen that sets out the philosophical poser the movie is set to explore:  ‘One must choose – to die …or to lie?’

    These verbal preliminaries are followed by the intriguing opening sequences of the film proper.  An uneasy, ill-looking man walks beside a canal, down through a gloomy underpass, back up and out into the open air of a bleak urban landscape.   A train goes past along a railway bridge far above but there’s no other human being in sight.  The man, dominated by his alienating environment, wears a belted mackintosh and a fedora (these will prove to be the outdoor uniform of the male characters in Le Doulos).  By the time the man reaches and enters a house, even though only a couple of minutes of screen time have passed, he seems to have completed a long journey.  The viewer experiences a sense of relief but it’s only momentary:  the interior of the place the man has entered is dark and unwelcoming.  The voice of another man offers him food but he says he’s not hungry, though he looks it.   The two men are criminals.  The undernourished one is Maurice Faugel (Serge Reggiani), newly released from prison.  The other, older man is Gilbert Varnove (René Lefèvre), whom we see at work examining jewels, the fruits of a recent robbery.   They discuss the heist Maurice is planning for the following evening and which he’ll carry out with two accomplices, Silien and Rémy.  Maurice insists that he trusts Silien, in spite of Gilbert’s warning that he’s a nark.  Gilbert tells Maurice where to find the gun he needs for the next night’s work and Maurice takes the weapon from a drawer.  They talk a little more.  Maurice exudes fatigue and cafard so strongly that he looks spent.  It’s a shock when he suddenly shoots Gilbert dead, and pockets the jewellery and a wad of notes.  He leaves the house just as two other gangsters arrive to collect the loot.  Maurice, with his bare hands, digs a hole in the ground beside a lamppost, scrabbling like a burrowing animal.  He buries the gun, the cash and the jewels there.

    So far, so compelling.  How come that, within another fifteen minutes, I was struggling with Le Doulos and, not much later, was bored and looking forward to its ending?  The struggle was largely a matter of failing to keep up with the who’s-fooling-who plot which, although it may not be greatly complicated by the standards of the genre, was too much for me.   The impatience had more to do with the film’s reversion to the wordiness of its introduction, in the form of dialogue, and so to wearing its brains on its sleeve.  I noticed when I picked it up that the BFI programme note was an extract from  Ginette Vincendeau’s 2003 study of Jean-Pierre Melville (subtitled ‘An American in Paris’) and was headed with a spoiler warning that the note ‘give[s] away some of the plot’:  there were times, as my grasp of the plot slackened, when I regretted sticking to my habit of never reading the programme note in advance.  But, in retrospect, I’m glad that I resisted – that I jotted down ‘Moral of story (in spite of intellectual pretensions): crime doesn’t pay.  And how’ before I read Vincendeau.  She concludes that:

    ‘In a more conventional film one could see in this ending a classic ‘crime does not pay’ message.  Silien’s palatial new home, paid for with ill-gotten gains, will not be lived in.  But this would be to ascribe to the film a moral framework that is alien to it.  The incursion into nouveau riche suburbia, which rhymes with and yet points to the difference from Gilbert’s seedy abode at the beginning, hints at a critique of 1960s embourgeoisement or at least a deliberate departure from it.’

    That sounds like a fancy way of saying ‘crime doesn’t pay’.

    Ginette Vincendeau’s piece is evidence of how differently a film scholar like her and a lay filmgoer will see Le Doulos.   As you’d expect, Vincendeau describes the picture in relation to other parts of the Melville oeuvre, classic French crime films and Hollywood noir.  She also describes the ‘spectacular narrative twist’ that Melville delivers some twenty minutes before the end of Le Doulos – the revelation that Silien is not, after all, a police informer.  We are, by this revelation, ‘stunned into rereading everything that has gone before’.   This may be true for cinéastes knowledgeable enough about Jean-Pierre Melville’s style and movie cross-references to be fully absorbed by these, and caught off guard by a ‘spectacular narrative twist’.  It wasn’t true for me and I doubt it would have been for much of the French audience that made Le Doulos a major commercial success on its release in 1963.  Silien is played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, one of the biggest French film stars of the time.  (The original trailer for Le Doulos, available on YouTube, is dominated by Belmondo, even though Serge Reggiani’s role, in terms of total screen time, is at least as big as his.)  Belmondo had already played criminals, notably in Breathless, but his phenomenally strong audience rapport, as well as his celebrity, would have militated against viewers simply taking Silien as the nasty nark he’s reputed and appears to be.   Because it’s Belmondo – as simpatico as he’s elusive – we are, rather, waiting for the explanation of how it turns out that he’s not just a despicable villain.  The temperamental and physical contrasts between him and the excellent Serge Reggiani are the strongest element of Le Doulos.  Both have star charisma yet inhabit their roles fully – they’re fascinating to watch just walking towards a building.  So is Michel Piccoli (one of the gangsters who gets to Gilbert’s too late in the opening episode).  The film is well cast and acted throughout – René Lefèvre’s Gilbert and Jean Desailly as a police inspector are particularly good.  The few women in the cast – Monique Hennessy, Fabienne Dali and Paulette Breil – all look convincingly used, even before their characters are variously abused at the hands of men.

    30 November 2016

  • A United Kingdom

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Amma Asante (2016)

    In 1925, at the age of four, Seretse Khama became king of the Bamangwato tribe in the Bechualand Protectorate in Southern Africa.   Throughout the next two decades, his uncle, Tshekedi Khama, served as Seretse’s regent and guardian.  After a year at Oxford, Seretse moved to London in 1946 to begin legal training at Inner Temple.  The following year, he met Ruth Williams, a white office worker at Lloyd’s of London.  Their interracial marriage in 1948 was deplored by the British and South African governments, as well as by the Bamangwato’s tribal elders.  On the newlyweds’ initial return to Bechuanaland, Tshekedi Khama demanded the annulment of the marriage but Seretse, addressing public meetings of the Bamangwato, persuaded his people that he should remain their hereditary leader.   International political opposition intensified, however:   once Seretse was back in England to continue his law studies, he and Ruth were exiled from Bechuanaland by the British government.   After a protest campaign on the couple’s behalf, sustained over several years, they were permitted to return to Seretse’s homeland.  The political career on which he then embarked led to Bechuanaland’s achieving independence:  he founded the Bechuanaland Democratic Party in the early 1960s and, in the territory’s first general elections in 1965, was returned as Prime Minister.   In September 1966, Bechuanaland became the independent state of Botswana, with Seretse Khama its inaugural president.   At the time the world’s third-poorest country, Botswana was transformed in the years that followed into a successful export-based economy.  Seretse Khama, knighted in 1966, remained President until his death in 1980.  Ruth survived him by more than twenty years.  One of their sons, Ian Khama, has been President of Botswana since 2008.

    Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom (a good title) tells the Khamas’ story from their first meeting in 1947 until the end of their exile in 1956.  The film proceeds at an even-paced plod:  you’re impatient for the photos of the real people and the what-happened-next summary legends to appear long before they eventually and inevitably do, just before the closing credits.  As with her previous film Belle, Asante has turned a historically important racial story into a moralising primer.  It’s true that protagonists who are thoroughly admirable and courageous, as Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams evidently were, aren’t always a dramatic advantage but this doesn’t bother Asante and Guy Hibbert, who wrote the pedestrian screenplay.  They don’t let the two principals have any human detail or texture, let alone any personal flaws – as if these would impugn their moral integrity and might reduce our esteem for them.  In the circumstances, David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike give good performances.   With Selma already under his belt, Oyelowo is getting to be an expert screen orator, and he makes Seretse Khama’s words convincingly his own.   (It’s an advantage that Khama’s voice and speech patterns aren’t nearly so well known as Martin Luther King’s:  there’s no danger here of Oyelowo’s interpretation coming across as skilful but careful mimicry, as I felt his playing of King did.)   Rosamund Pike’s looks seem very right for the period of the story and she’s likeable as Ruth Williams.  In her early scenes, her London accent has faint traces of Cockney that suddenly disappear.  I wasn’t sure if this was a piece of characterisation (Ruth’s talking posher once she realises her boyfriend was born to be a king) or forgetfulness.

    It’s hardly surprising, given A United Kingdom’s moral scheme and Amma Asante’s unnuanced direction, that some of the supporting cast are bad, especially those playing obstructive pillars of the British establishment.  Jack Davenport is abominable as Alistair Canning, the British government’s man in South Africa:  Davenport gives us not a character but a sneering commentary on Canning’s political position.  Tom Felton is only relatively tolerable as Canning’s sidekick.  The Africans in the story are condescendingly written.  Tshekedi (Vusi Kunene), Seretse’s sister (Terry Pheto) and his aunt (Abena Ayivor) all belong to a nearly obligatory category of personnel in morally uplifting drama:  initially suspicious of what the heroes are up to, they see sense in due course.  As Ruth’s father, Nicholas Lyndhurst, with an unfortunately Hitlerish moustache and hairstyle, undergoes a similar conversion although he handles it creditably.  Ruth’s mother (Anastasia Hille) and sister (Laura Carmichael) are more consistently sympathetic.  The film, photographed by Sam McCurdy, is pleasant to look at and Patrick Doyle’s score is pleasant enough to listen to although it’s hardly original:  it keeps threatening to turn into John Barry’s Out of Africa music.

    For a movie that looks to aim no higher than to work through key events in the story, A United Kingdom does a clumsy job handling the political aspects.  We understand that the post-war Labour government, up to its eyes in debt, can’t afford to alienate apartheid South Africa, rich in gold and uranium reserves.  Reference is also made to the diamond mines that proved a major factor in Botswana’s later economic development.  But a showdown between Prime Minister Attlee and Tony Wedgwood Benn (as he was at the time) is political dramatisation at its crudest:  they face off in the public entrance hall of the House of Commons, shouting at each other as if anxious for the world to hear them.  It’s hard to see why this scene has been included at all.  Although Benn (Jack Lowden) was one of the Khamas’ most steadfast supporters, this doesn’t really come through in later scenes.  Anton Lesser’s cameo is certainly unexpected:  he achieves a bizarre first by presenting Clement Attlee as a hysteric.   Although Winston Churchill doesn’t make an appearance, the narrative makes much of his opposition to the Labour government’s exile order, and of Churchill’s change of heart once the Conservatives return to office.  Amma Asante’s flat-footed staging somehow manages to suggest that Seretse Khama policy was the central plank of the Tory manifesto in the 1951 general election.  The film omits to mention that the Khamas were allowed to return to Bechuanaland as private citizens, after Seretse had renounced the Bamangwato tribal throne.  Late on, after the post-exile return, Tshekedi Khama tells his nephew, ‘You’ve convinced me, Seretse, now you need to convince the country’.  I’d no idea what Tshekedi meant by this or when he’s saying it.  Seretse’s tribe appeared to be convinced by him back in 1948 – long before Tshekedi and other family members were.  Is this scene an unexplained flash forward to the 1965 elections in Bechuanaland?

    26 November 2016

    Postscript:  Seretse Khama is confronted by a pack of newshounds and a burst of flash bulbs in two or three standard-issue sequences.  Blink and you’ll miss, as one of the reporters, an actor called Will Featherstone.  A week before seeing A United Kingdom, I went with friends to a national touring production of Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall at York Theatre Royal.  It’s not much of a play and this wasn’t, in many respects, much of a performance of it.  But if you’ve got good people for Dan, the young murderer, and Mrs Bramson, the silly, selfish old woman who takes a shine to him, it’s enough to make an entertaining evening.  Gwen Taylor was a fine Mrs Bramson and Will Featherstone’s physically and emotionally unpredictable Dan was often excellent, in spite of insufficiently attentive direction.  I hope this actor goes on to better things on stage and to screen work in better films than A United Kingdom.

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