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Credits
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Summary
A band of crooks carry out a bank robbery and then an incredible hold-up
on a train. When he investigates the crimes, Parisian detective Commissaire
Coleman discovers that they were masterminded by his friend - the night
club owner Simon, abetted by his seductive girlfriend, Cathy...Review
For his final film, Jean-Pierre Melville returns to the genre which he felt
most comfortable with and in which he excelled, the existentialist crime
thriller. Un flic comes from the same mould as his earlier
masterpieces, such as Le Cercle
rouge, Le Deuxième
souffle and Le Samouraï,
portraying a grim world of masculine solitude and violence in which
crime seldom pays. Here, Melville attempted to go further than he dared in his earlier
films to depict the moral equivalence of crook and cop, and seems to conclude
that the two classes of individuals differ only in the way in which they
follow their chosen careers: the crook is an artist, the cop a petty bureaucrat.
The difficulty is that the film veers to far to the abstract and in doing
so loses contact with the audience.
The film has an amazing opening sequence, with a magnificently shot bank robbery set on a windswept coast. The cold, detached style in which this sequence is filmed is evocative of Melville’s greatest films and there is a sense that Un flic could be the director’s best work yet. Unfortunately, the plot quickly gets muddled and the perspective shifts from the concrete to the abstract. Melville’s attention to detail, often his strength, proves to be the film’s downfall, and some parts of the film (such as the train heist) are overly directed. The film is also far less technically accomplished than Melville’s earlier works. This is in part due to compromises needed to achieve the film’s ambitious sequences on a limited budget (Melville often had difficulty getting the level of financial support he hoped for ). This is most noticeable in the train hold-up sequence, which is filmed with a combination of full-size studio props and scale models of a train and helicopter. By today’s standards, the sequence is laughably bad and renders the entire sequence totally unconvincing. Un flic is also let down by some lacklustre acting performances. Even Catherine Deneuve fails to sparkle, despite her evident talent and beauty. The film sees Alain Delon playing a law-enforcer rather than a law-breaker for the first time in his career. Having established himself in tough criminal roles over the past decade, the actor fails to convince, and this could have been a major factor in the film's failure at the box office. © James Travers 2001 |
 
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