aka The Finger-Man
Burglar Faugel (Serge Reggiani) has just been released from prison, and becomes involved in a needlessly complicated game of betrayal, revenge and trust, that has him – and the audience – doubt his friend Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) while trying to escape the attention of the police and some nasty colleagues.
If you go into Le Doulos having mostly experienced the final four or five movies of director Jean-Pierre Melville, you might be in for a bit of a shock. Sure, the characters’ fashion sense and Melville’s at once cynical and romantic view of their world is there and accounted for, but where the late films show a focussed sparseness in their plotting, and a slowness that’s also fastidiously detail-oriented, Le Delous is all over the place.
It’s slow alright, but this slowness finds the characters meandering through the kind of painful overplotting that needs ten minutes in the end to explain at (and it’s really at, not to) the audience what was actually going on; before that, the film is mostly characters wandering around, talking a lot, sometimes entering the sort of scenes of stylistic magic you usually expect from Melville but soon enough going off again into directions of little interest or filmic power.
Speaking of the talking, after having seen Le Doulos, I can’t help but wonder if the sparseness of dialogue in later Melville films isn’t a result of the man realizing that he has no hand at all for staging dialogue sequences. At the very least, the film at hand regularly comes to a complete standstill in dialogue sequences that take double the time they should – even if you keep the general more wordy nature of French films and cinema of its time in mind – Melville seemingly having no idea how to get out of any scene whatsoever, and so just staying there, and staying there, and staying there forever. Let’s not even talk about how inelegant and awkward the whole plot twist and long, long detailed explanation at the end of the film is.
It’s all very peculiar particularly since other early Melville films don’t show this massive load of flaws at all; young Melville certainly had his own ideas about pacing, but they actually felt like ideas, unlike here, where they suggest incompetence, or a director trying to share his feeling of boredom with his audience – not things I otherwise connect with Melville’s films.
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