Un Flic (A Cop): Dirty Mouth don’t care about the Truth but tells Beautiful Lies
Chapter 1
The Truth about Bob Dylan
“All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie”
An essential quandary of the world delivered with an impossibly terse memorable elliptical paradoxical swing at the big void that asserts and negates itself at one and the same time.
In other words,
Typical Dylan. (shrugs) He further underscores the impossibility improbability ephemerality of it all by declaring that he’s in love with a woman that don’t even appeal to him.
The song, ‘Things have changed’… a late Dylan classic that he scored for the sensationally whacked-out film ‘Wonder Boys’ for which he was duly acknowledged with an Oscar.
Moving back to ‘Typical Dylan’. What does it mean? What does it stand for? What iz ze significance of Dylan? Is it emblematic? Schematic? Just what in the hell-matic do you mean by ‘Typical Dylan’.
Martin Scorsese got on the job. Tons of archival footage and grueling interviews later, he discovers a quintessential American Story. Then it was the turn of yet another auteur- Todd Haynes. Haynes particle accelerated the Dylan persona and came up with a collage as mystifying and stupefying as ol’ Bob himself, with full credit to Haynes. Haynes’ Dylan was an androgynous conflicted personality- one that spanned across time, space, gender, reality, myth and every dimension the human mind can wrap its mind about. Haruki Murakami describes Dylan as something of a ‘little child staring at the rain and singing”. El Duderino Michael Chabon trips on him as ‘a Jewish cowboy singing with ache and ardor’
Moving back again. What is the ‘Typical Dylan’? It’s comparable to asking what is the ‘Typical Heartbreak’ or ‘Typical First love’ or ‘Typical early-morning-sunrise-out-the-window-of-moving train’. Damned if you get it right but you’ll never get it all.
Bob Dylan is an abstract. You find him along winding railroads, across a bar, in a movie about tragic heroes, in the anarchy of an unruly protest march, in the pages of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in a sudden moment that arrives over you with a gentle draft of sea breeze… like you might find something like love or the heartache blues or a moment of clarity or the misty pull of homesickness.
Dylan is a myth in continuous flux with every moment of his life, every public gesture, every speculation contributing a new hue, a different interpretation to his greatest work of art, his work in progress, one that will last an eternity and then, a day… his life.
Typical Dylan?
It’s all in your head. Just like with Scorsese, Haynes, Murakami, Chabon. We look into Dylan only to find a part of ourselves, our dreams, our desires, our emotions, our fears- both private and public.
Dylan is an Image. See the man strum his guitar all alone in a beam of light so strong that it blinds you and all you can see is a shadow. Real. Unreal. Transient. Eternal. The Saint. The Devil. The Bulldog.
And it’s always a damn fine day for poetry.
Chapter 2
The Seduction of Jean-Pierre Melville
‘I am never realistic… What I do is false. Always.’
Jean-Pierre Melville was a modest, reticent individual. A trait that few of his acolytes, both real and honorary- Jean-Luc Goddard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Jarmusch, De Palma, Woo, Scorsese, Tarantino etc can lay claim to. In fact I can broadly declare that a large percentage of all that we love about cinema seems to derive from this unassuming Frenchman.
A trait that he does seem to share with most of his aforementioned acolytes is an inordinate obsession and knowledge of all things pop culture, specifically, all things American. Jazz-aficionado, comic/pulp fiction-philiac and above all else, an unparalleled, unsurpassable, monumental, gargantuan fixation with the great American B-movie within which he discovered his Images, his leitmotifs, his basic notes.
A tough-talking-steely-eyed man hunched weary in a shadowy corner of the street, away from the streetlamps, trying to light a cigarette from under a fedora and overcoat. A femme fatale with legs from here to the roof of the Sistine chapel, pouting that dirty sexy mouth, at once both sugar sweet and cold-blooded as the business end of a .32. A city of alleys so dark that the devil himself would lose his way walking from one corner to the other. Morality like loose change and fate like an ominous shadow. Survival as a high-stakes roulette. But the glamour of it all is undeniable. The initial appeal is a primal response, a “Hello Sucker”.
Underscoring this cool-as-hell fatality was also the tragedy of lives broken and lost. Sometimes in terrifyingly insignificant and random ways. Notions of good, bad, heroes and heroines and true love and happy-sappy-ever-after endings that the spit-polished Studio production would peddle were archly subverted. There was a strange even confusing ambiguity about these cheap knocked-together productions. It was these deep shades of grey, coupled with radical film-making techniques (necessitated sometimes by sheer poverty of funds), that charged these films with an animal rawness. And when offered respite from the stolid, constipated output that had become characteristic of French Cinema, Melville gleefully suckered himself in. He was well and truly… seduced.
Chapter 3
Whatever Happened to ‘Un Flic’
Of Melville’s oeuvre ‘Bob Le Flambeur’, ‘Le Samourai’ and ‘Le Cercle Rouge’ are the most acclaimed, well-known, lauded and loved. Among his non-noir work ‘Les Enfants Terribles’, his adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s controversial tale of incest has also been the subject of much dialogue and debate while recently his ‘Le Doulos’ and ‘Duex Hommes Dans Manhattan’ have received the swanky Criterion treatment. That’s all swell, but unfortunately it leaves his final work, ‘Un Flic’ rather alone on the musty shelves of the criminally under-rated and overlooked. A quick Google will reveal that enthusiasm for this movie is almost muted and all reviews are quick to compare notes with the Bob-Samourai-Rouge trio and declare it a ‘relatively minor’ work. And while I have seen and tremendously enjoyed ‘Le Samourai’ and ‘Le Cercle Rouge’… there’s definitely something special about ‘Un Flic’. Maybe it was the time, the weather, my state of mind or maybe it’s because I hadn’t amped my expectations. Maybe I just didn’t get the other two. Maybe I need to revisit them and cross-check (high priority).
But fuck that… all of that… ‘Un Flic’ is swoon-stuff. It may not be the greatest but it is most certainly, un very sexy sexy thing and it swings way cool.
Chapter 4
Un Flic (A Cop)(1972)
Straight off the bat, what got me revved first about ‘Un Flic’ was Melville’s blatant, self-confessed artifice. This is the stuff beautiful lies are made off.
The movie opens on a stormy seafront and we see a Plymouth gliding across spare cool blue-tinted frames. These striking comic book-like frames alternate with quiet white-on-black credit cards and culminate in ‘The Image’. The storm has precipitated into rain, the car stops some distance away from a Bank and through the water splashed on the windshield we are shown an ‘Image’- shadows of four men sitting inside wearing fedoras.
Melville cuts to Paris at late-noon. Dusk and darkness are impending, streetlamps are being lit and the titular Flic (Cop) Edward Costello is out on his rounds of the city and a voiceover of his typically moody monologue is relayed on the soundtrack.
Once again, we’re taken back to the seafront. The storm has increased in fury and one by one with all the math of a perfectly executed rhythm, 3 of the occupants of the Plymouth wander into the bank. Melville’s camera follows them, observing with his legendary Monalisa gaze, ambiguously and with extreme patience every detail of the operation. 20 straight minutes. Sans dialogue. Sans background score. No intrusive cuts. No radical camera angles. Silent, still, observant… this is cinema approaching a very pure form and there is awareness that a veritable master is at the helm. Yet it is even possible to take it all for granted for unlike Ozu and Bresson, Melville is not angling for a sense of the transcendent. In his modest, reticent manner what he conjures is most amazing… he ratchets up the tension and turns it to the max.
As the thieves make their way out the bank, all traces of the raging storm seem to have disappeared. Melville reveals his artifice- the force of nature he had orchestrated only to set tone for the heist sequence. Now he has no further use for it and perhaps even absolutely delights in letting in the audience on a glimpse into his bag of tricks.
Later in the film, Melville pushes the envelope of his masterful 20 minute explosive combination of artifice, silence and suspense even further. In lesser hands such a scene would easily result in utter camp. It has all the elements primed for a Connery-era Bond film set-piece- helicopters, trains, oversized magnets, disguises, a tough guy with bleached hair and a suitcase-full of cocaine. Melville hardly attempts to fake any overt reality from the model trains and the blatant sets but accumulates the details, wins over our disbelief and orchestrates a nail-biting cliffhanger simulating both momentum and second-by-second high tension.
It is customary for a Melville film to begin with a quote which delineates the central concern but provides a moral/spiritual/philosophical framework in which to view the film. ‘Le Samourai’ began with an ancient Samurai aphorism while ‘Le Cercle Rouge’ quoted from the Buddha, both of which Melville later claimed as convenient fabrications that he himself had constructed. ‘Un Flic’ begins with a bleak one credited to Victorian- era fugitive-turned-detective Vidocq- The only two feelings men give rise to are ambiguity and derision. The titular Flic, Costello repeats the quote as though through gritted teeth and then repeats the last word again as his face obscures into darkness- “Derision”
There is a strange nihilistic fury, as intense as it is blind, at the heart of ‘Un Flic’. In ‘Le Samourai’ and ‘Le Cercle Rouge’ there were codes, loyalties, bonds and decencies. In ‘Un Flic’, everything goes. The Centre does not hold and things fall apart. Life itself is the corrosive toxin that has eroded all humanity in man. ‘Le Samourai’ and ‘Le Cercle Rouge’ were tragedies that chronicled the inevitable end of a way of life while ‘Un Flic’ is Melville’s direct critique of the modern. That would be to put it mildly.
With ‘Un Flic’ he’s declaring the fucking apocalypse.
It veers into relentlessly bleak territory. In a scene that brings to mind Tom Cruise’s never-ending ramble through an absurd night of perversion and decadence in the New York of Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, Costello passes from one gruesome encounter to the other but the only thing more dangerous than the heinous crimes and the unrepentant, sleazy criminals is the routine and almost inhuman detachment with which the policeman carries out his job. He and his partner hardly talk to each other. The partner’s eyes seem strangely haunted like trapped in a perpetual nightmare while Costello’s are hardened-to-stone and impenetrable. His demeanor never thaws even on the two occasions when he has supposedly let his guard down- once while talking to an informant and once during a brief romantic encounter with a beautiful woman he may or may not love.
Melville plays loose and fast with the Images, the signs and symbols and conventions of the genre. This not only deepens the ambiguity and volatility of the film but lends it that cracking anarchic flavor. In that sense it reminds me of ‘The Dark Knight’. But while ‘The Dark Knight’ is a sensory overload being hurled at you from a great height with great velocity, ‘Un Flic’ is a seduction sublime, its subversion creeps on you like a fine jazz note.
The final scene is the coldest of calculations. Its impact is subtle yet not without provocation and distress. Much blood has been shed and lives have been spent, all too easily, too cheaply and without regard or honor. The audience might even reflect tragically on all that they have witnessed but not the two pair of cold unfathomable eyes of the perpetrator staring out of the screen. The face is composed, striking in its features even uncommonly handsome yet there is an aura of death and foreboding in it. There is something tragic about it and also an unspeakable inhuman terror. The faintest strains of jazz accompany on the soundtrack.
The beauty of the film though is after it ends and coils up and unspools in the privacy of your head-space. You’re reminded it’s called Un Flic (A Cop) yet the movie spends a larger share of its runtime chronicling the thieves, almost bookending their escapades with extremely brief episodes of the Cop’s life. The beguiling structure of the film, the strange passivity, the ambiguities, the horror, the tragedy, the critique, the moments of pure cinema, the title sequence, the jazz swing of the film, the seminal images, the silhouettes…..
Like I said before,
It’s always a damn fine day for poetry.
Epilogue
Jean-Pierre Melville’s moniker of ‘the godfather of the New Wave’ is apt but just too damn limiting. He is more likely the granddaddy of all that is cool in cinema spanning time, space, genre. And I’m talking the most hip-hip-hip here. That the American B-movies were reappraised and assigned ‘classic’ status and the word ‘noir’ came to be widely and ever so loosely circulated is in a big way thanks to him. Remember how cool and joyful it was to realize the perfect sync between the movie’s title and the movie itself in ‘Pulp Fiction’. Well, read my lips and look no further than Melville. Then there’s Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, increasingly becoming one of the most pivotal films of this decade, which owes its very existence to the films of Melville. And that’s just the tip of an iceberg in a continuous upward spiral.
Hell, I can just about imagine Godard sitting through a Melville film and in an inspired moment, adjust his black-rimmed glasses, rise abruptly and with one hand on his belt buckle, other in the air, as he justifiably declares,
“ Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world”
Jean-Pierre Melville
(pics courtesy- filmforno, wikipedia, Noir of the Week, Tom Sutpen)
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Onir
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Shilpa Shukla
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Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
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woah ….ur usage petrifies me …..just the thought about wt must have gone thru ur head to write an article of such novelty brings a wierd smile to my face!….ur passion screams loud…its not easy to articulate one’s passion and u have just done that….most of the times i try to express wt i feel after a watchin a movie…..but the deficiencies i carry create versions ,sub,trip versions of the illuminated
montages i hold in my head…evry montage has its space….and am striving to be articulate to create that sort of space to every other montage/cinema i come across….!!…..waitin for your next…..this is indeed is passion for cinema!
Dude this article is so derivative!
Good Morning.
The Maharishi: [Dewey meditating with Maharashi and The Beatles] Only through meditation can we begin to understand our role.
Paul McCartney: We’re nothin but… grains of sand.
Dewey Cox: That was freakin’ transcendental Paul McCartney. Don’t you agree John Lennon?
John Lennon: Yes Dewey Cox. With meditation there’s no limit to what we can…
[glares at the camera]
John Lennon: *imagine*.
Dewey Cox: What do you think George Harrison of The Beatles?
George Harrison: I don’t know. You know? I’m just trying to get more songs on the album.
Ringo Starr: And as Ringo Starr, I’m not so interested in meditation, I just like to have fun.
[holds up peace sign]
Dewey Cox: [laughs] I like the little one.
I always thought Dylan was a Punjabi Cowboy. Only with subtitles.
I guess Melville was the founding member of ‘Formula Un’ Club.
I forgot my goal of watching all Melville films in 2008. I only watched Le Samourai. Didn’t think it was that great. Loved a lot of things about it.
Bob Dylan is a Car Salesman. And the car is Cadiliac.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxlgjhb9×6M
Will get back to you in 5 days on Melville.
This Melville trip needs to go on. I have mixed images from Un Flic & Le Circle Rouge. Trains. cops. heist. extended sequences. all quiet in their silent glory. atmospheric. atmospherics. rooms with empty walls, and the fact that you are made to think of them. rooms in the closet, bars with a prominent ‘owner’ character with a touch of gray, fainted-out jazz, the ambient sounds and light, all of it almost takes you in that time and place, and not like a film where you ‘gaze’ into it. I was feeling so utterly bored and devoid of anything at times, it felt like its raining outside and I would check on the clothes. something. and then it would happen, like you said, the pull and push of what he has decided to unleash and what he has decided to subvert. I like how senses’ calls it ‘explicitly tender’. In fact it is quite a nice and heavy write-up there on Senses. some gems from it:
Staged composition, direct engagement and distanced contemplation, a cinema of process,
Melville is a filmmaker that almost everyone seems to admire, but few know what to do with (other than those who attempt to slavishly copy or evoke his work).
“Classical cinema, basically, had to do with heroes, so-called modern cinema is to do with grubs. I have always refused to go along with this regression… I always arrange my characters – my ‘heroes’ – to conduct themselves within their environment, whatever it might be, the way I would conduct myself […] To be frank, I’m only able to become interested in characters who reflect some aspect of myself. Egocentric, paranoiac, megalomaniac? No: quite simply the natural authority of the creator. ”
Great guy to write on too, much like many other great film makers, he inspires observation, research, deduction, referencing, comparison, and of course the age old fun game of derivation. Dark Knight example was good. I was thinking many films while these films were playing, so many direct and indirect connections. Right down to our very own Vijay Anand – Jewel Thief, Teesri Manzil. I am obviously in need of re-watches but some scenes do linger – the one where the prison character is being made an offer, and how we get to see the odds of it, the pre-mature shootout, the way ‘weapons’ have been dealt with, all the bar sequences(Santi) and the way it plays out/turn around, the whole ‘movement’ thing – whenever anything gets into ‘action’, like a character runs or does something fast, like the post-heist car thing in the night city street when the alrm has gone out, and still it is so, to put it mildy, inconsequential.