50th Anniversary: Le Cercle Rouge – The Red Circle (1970)

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

[Exterior. Paris. Grey, grey, grey.]

Alain Delon, Gian-Maria Volonté and Yves Montand play an unlikely trio- one was just released from jail, the second fled it, and the third is an ex-cop. The three plan a big coup by breaking into a big jewelry store at Place Vendome and are being chased by a grim inspector and rivals from the underworld. Le Cercle Rouge by the french Nouvelle Vague pioneer and Film noir master Jean-Pierre Melville is a big, gloomy gangster film about friendship and loyalty, about guilt and betrayal. Centered around this precisely planned break-in, and with a famous heist-scene that is 30 minutes long and without any dialogue, it is the masterpiece in the championship of the neo-noir crime film.

It is not unusual that 10 minutes will pass before we hear the first words of dialogue in a Melville film, often being already over 30 scenes into the story. His cinema is one of a grey cinematography that loves the blue monochrome night, when reality is at its most poetic and self-knowledge most acute, faces sculptured by light and shadow, the modelage of time and silence. It is a cinema of few words, words replaced by gestures, close-ups of silent faces, and just the flicker of thoughts. These faces all tell the same melvillian story: they are all marked by fatality, and death is their destiny.

Siddhartha Gautama: the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: “When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever the diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle.” (Epigraph to Le Cercle Rouge)

In Le Cercle Rouge, like in most of Melville’s films, his protagonists cannot escape their fates- they all die, being shot from behind, cold and trist, and the film ends. They are noble on their way to death, not rearing up anxiously like deadly injured animals, but facing it calmly and composed. Gestures and habits become the unchanged rituals of survival: lighting a cigarette, dressing stylishly, adjusting the hat, putting on gloves and driving the car. The life of a gangster consists of ceremonial acts, and the melvillian gangster rises above ordinary people by dying in dignity.

Melville cast actors like Alain Delon and Yves Montand on their credibility in the loneliness, betrayal, violence, and male friendship of solitary silence. His is an entirely male cinema, and his protagonists move on a path of self-destruction or self-sacrifice, it is a melancholy realm of beautiful characters dispossessed by fate. And it is this what distinguishes Melville’s films from just being crime movies, because they culminate in fundamental feelings and universal emotions. Thus, in addition to the solid structure and crime-plot of his stories, Melville always strived to show the torments of men exposed to their fate.

Melville’s morality is surprising and demanding: there can only be an absolute sincerity, though it often manifests itself in unlikely ways and tortuous paths. Having been a resistance-fighter in his youth, Melville’s life and work stays true to La Resistànce. Nobody in his universe seems to know that the war is over, and they do not waste one thought on laying their arms down. Their war is never over. A solidarity connects the typical protagonists of his cinema, especially the bad boys, the scapegraces, the hard-boiled guys of the underworld, and the fighters of La Resitànce. A solidarity due to their code of honor, their existence in the underground, the precision of their practices and their knowledge. But also due to their relation to commitment and betrayal, their ability to endure pain and kill each other in the name of morality and silence.

Alain Delon gave his best performances in his three films with Melville, with his talents and features being perfectly led and distilled within this unique actor-director symbioses. Unforgotten is his extremely focused and chilling performance as ice-cold and detached killer in Le Samourai, the most acknowledged film in Melville’s oeuvre. With no visible feelings and thoughts, but just delivering the lonely routine of a killer- yet with a streak of vertigo hinting at a personality disorder making him perceive the world from behind a somnambule veil- Delon was devoted to Melville after playing Le Samourai. His performance in Le Cercle Rouge is even better though, without the vertigo-effect even more minimalistic and austere in the sense of American ‘underacting’, being an almost abstract figure within the narrative construction, but with his typical unmoved and anonymous compassion.

Le Cercle Rouge also has an excellent jazz-crime score composed by Eric Demarsan, who collaborated with the great Francois de Roubaix (Le Samourai) before. It underlines the cool chic and fatalism with modern jazz sounds and the typical European 60s & 70s melancholy in its themes. Melville used film music in the most sophisticated sense, to deliberately sculpture the silence that dominates his films, to form feelings and thoughts with sound when they just flicker on screen.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s passionate admiration of the American cinema of the 30’s and 40’s is the fundament for his cinematic determination, but he took it further and perfectionized it. It’s beautiful to see the French-American circle close with contemporary directors such as Jim Jarmusch referring to Melville as one of their major influences.
It is a cinema fallen out of time, slow-paced, chic, in absence of modern chaos and cacophony, but do yourself a favor to discover it and shed a tear over what we have lost, and the unavoidable fatality of everything.

by Saliha Enzenauer