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
