Le Doulos

by Ian Johnston

Ian Johnston is an expatriate New Zealander who's been living and teaching in Taipei since 1991. He has a M.A. in German Language and Literature from the University of Auckland, N.Z.; and throughout the 1980s he was involved in running the Film Society in Auckland.

Jean-Pierre Melville's 1963 crime thriller Le Doulos marks the first of the series of stripped-down, aestheticised, iconic films that truly characterise his work. In this vein Le Doulos was followed by Le Deuxième Souffle (1966); Le Samouraï (1967), Melville's quintessential film and his masterpiece; Le Cercle Rouge (1970) ; and the less successful Un Flic (1972), Melville's final film. (The two other films from this period following on from Le Doulos - 1963's L'Ainé des Ferchaux and 1969's L'Armée des Ombres - are more throwbacks to his earlier style of, respectively, thrillers and literary adaptations.)

Melville himself was a significant role model for the French New Wave critics-turned-directors - hence his cameo appearance (in his characteristic Stetson and Ray-Bans) as the writer Parvulesco in Jean-Luc Godard's À Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1959). The model was one of economic and aesthetic independence from French cinema's dominant tradition de qualité (so despised by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics), something that Melville established from his very first film, Le Silence de la Mer (shot in 1947, commercially released in 1949). But it was his Bob le Flambeur (1956) that was the clearest model, in its homage to American genre cinema, in the spirit of looseness and freedom particularly apparent in the early on-location scenes in Montmartre, and in the expression it gave to a younger French generation (especially the character of the sexually amoral - but never judged moralistically - character of Anne, played by the teenager Isobel Corey).

It's ironic that subsequent to the emergence of the Cahiers critics as directors of feature films in their own right, Melville with Le Doulos explicitly turned away from the model he had offered those critics. It's equally ironic that, although New Wave exercises in the crime thriller genre such as Claude Chabrol's À Double Tour (Leda/Web of Passion, 1959) and François Truffaut's Tirez sur le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960) had been critical and box-office failures, Melville's Le Doulos was a considerable hit.

A further distinction between Melville and the New Wave directors was the choice of source material for their crime thrillers. The latter adapted American crime novels to a French setting - this was the case for both À Double Tour and Tirez sur le Pianiste, as well as for later Truffaut thrillers (La Mariée était en noir [The Bride Wore Black, 1968], La Sirène du Mississippi [Mississippi Mermaid, 1969]) and for Godard's Bande à part (1964) and Pierrot le Fou (1965). With Le Doulos on the other hand, Melville adapted a 1957 French crime novel of the same name by Pierre Lesou; and while it was grounded in a recognisable French reality, Melville proceeded to layer on to the film the influences of his much-loved American cinema, in particular that of American film noir. One aspect of this is the way settings and décor created for the film seem more based on American cinema than French reality. This borrowing is even more apparent in the high-contrast black-and white-lighting and the iconography of clothing (trench-coats and hats - hardly typical of French life in the early sixties) that is taken from film noir. Very emblematic of Melville's whole approach is the way hats are used to link the two main protagonists: in the early part of the film Faugel (Serge Reggiani) adjusts his hat in the mirror; Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) does exactly the same at the end.

Clothing also helps to blur the identities of the protagonists, as is very apparent in the evocative, mood-setting opening credit sequence. The film opens with a brief text explanation of the meaning of "doulos", gangster slang for a police informer: white text on a pitch-black background, in completely silence. Only when the explanation comes to an end, do we briefly get the sound of footsteps, quickly followed by a dramatic jazzy score as the title credits flash on the screen, finishing with that of Jean-Paul Belmondo. Which is then followed by the start of a long tracking shot, right to left, as a figure in trench-coat and hat emerges from the shadows: Belmondo, the star and presumably hero of the film, we assume. In fact, as the figure emerges into the light we see it's not Belmondo, but Reggiani; at which point the title "Le Doulos" is superimposed over him. Which leads us to another assumption: that the police informer of the title will be the Reggiani character.

Both initial assumptions prove to be wrong, as does our interpretation of the actions and motivations of a number of characters. First off, there's our assessment of Gilbert (Réné Lefevre). The title credits tracking shot leads us first to a typical Melvillean existential statement ("One must choose. Die… or lie?"), and then into an urban wasteland, the location of Gilbert's house. Gilbert, a fence, is identified as an old friend of Faugel's, who goes over the details of a burglary he has set up for his friend, fresh out after four years in jail, and his assistance even extends to lending him a gun, albeit reluctantly. And it is this gun that Faugel uses, shockingly and suddenly, to kill him. The details of the reasons for this killing are only revealed later (that this is in revenge for Gilbert's murder of Faugel's girlfriend), so we may think Faugel has killed Gilbert for the jewels he was working on (and which Faugel buries in the wasteland outside the house, presumably to be collected later). What's important is that Gilbert - and Faugel, in his killing of Gilbert - form one chain in a pattern Melville weaves throughout the film of uncertain identities, loyalties and motivations.

The most critical example of this is Belmondo's character, the informer Silien. (Yes, Melville's title credit over Faugel/Reggiani deliberately misdirected us.) But even this view of Silien as the informer of the title is subjected to a dramatic reconsideration by the surprise plot twist of the film. (Anyone wanting to preserve that surprise from a first viewing of the film should skip the rest of this paragraph and probably the next!) For the bulk of the film we view Silien as a cynical, cold-blooded, amoral manipulator: he lies and cheats and manoeuvres, contacts the police, viciously - and excessively - beats up Faugel's current girlfriend, all apparently with the aim of setting Faugel, his "friend", up and getting hold of the jewels stolen from Gilbert. But the dramatic twist towards the end of the film then reveals that all these machinations have been put into effect for Faugel's benefit, by his true friend Silien, to save him from the real betrayer, the real informer, his girlfriend Thérèse (Monique Hennessy).

So the plot of Le Doulos in the end turns on questions of male friendship, between the cool Belmondo, always in control (until the tragic end) of the twists and turns of the plot, and the weaker Reggiani/Faugel, who decidedly loses control of this plot. The friendship between the two is very much an archetypal "given" rather than a relationship that is explored with any kind of psychological depth. This is another side to the abstract quality that Melville brings to the classic series of thrillers that Le Doulos initiates. This male friendship is also one that excludes women, literally in the way Thérèse is beaten, tied up, abused, and ultimately killed. On the initial release there was considerable negative reaction to the scenes of violence meted out to Thérèse and Melville seems to have taken this criticism to heart: in his later films the exclusion of women operates at a more metaphorical level, in the way, for example, that women are absent from any significant narrative role in Le Cercle Rouge.

The film ends on an inevitable, tragic note, but in a great sense this tragedy gives ultimate meaning to the relationship between Silien and Faugel. The iconographic link between the two men (instanced in the play with hats and mirrors that I've already mentioned, but also the way Melville shoots Silien's recovery of the hidden jewels in such a way that we think it's Faugel in his trench-coat) finds its ultimate expression in the way the two men sacrifice themselves, to the point of death, for one another.

The final tragedy is set in motion by Faugel's misunderstanding of Silien's motives and actions, paralleling what we in the audience have been subject to in relation to a number of characters and incidents. And once Faugel has hired the contract killer Kern (Carl Struder), in a sense characteristic noir fate takes over: nothing can stop now the inevitable conclusion. Melville shifts this tragic climax to Silien's empty, isolated suburban mansion, and the sense that the following events - Kern's waiting in the house, Silien's delayed return, Faugel's race to catch up with him and warn him, and his unwitting overtaking of Silien and arrival before him at the house - are following the laws of an inevitable Fate are heightened by being set in the midst of a raging rainstorm. There's a marvelous shot at the start of this final sequence of events, when Faugel receives a phone call at a bar which reminds him of the contract he has temporarily forgotten about: Melville shows us the edges of the bar counter at the bottom of the frame, two windows - with the rain falling outside - forming the symmetrical background to the shot, and a white-coated forearm stretching from the right into the frame, holding out the black receiver; all that empty, abstracted space is waiting to receive Faugel into the frame, and launch the chain of events that will lead to the deaths of all three men.

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The BFI has produced an excellent DVD (R2 PAL) of Le Doulos: a good transfer (1.66:1 anamorphic), with a good batch of extras: principally, an introduction to the film by Ginette Vincendeau , her own commentary on three representative sequences from the film, and a video interview with German director Volker Schlöndorff, who served as assistant director to Melville.

Notes

Also available on DVD, from the Criterion Collection, which I have already written about; see: Ian Johnston, Le Cercle Rouge, www.thefilmjournal.com/issue8/rouge.html.

Author of the only critical work on Melville available in English, and a definitive one at that: Ginette Vincendeau, Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris, London, BFI, 2003.