Jean-Pierre Melville' s U.F.O.

Like Hitchcock, Jean-Pierre Melville hated film shoots. Both were control freaks. Principal photography was when things could go wrong.

Until shooting started, the ideal film existed in their head, its nearly perfect clone, scripted and storyboarded, on paper.
In Jean-Pierre Melville’s universe, the director casts himself as Fate.

With principal photography, his universe meets the physical world. They must collide or there will be no film.

If they do not collide as per the director’s calculation, Melville’s minutely plotted tale will be derailed : the collision will bear another movie than the one the director envisioned.
As camera starts rolling, Fate turns vulnerable to the accidents and hazards of human life. Worse, the demiurge has to share and partially trust his perfect film to mortals : actors, crew, even producers.

« L’enfer, c’est les autres » - Hell, that’s the others - : in few places is Sartre’s statement more true than on a film set. Day after day, take after take, the director has to communicate, sell or force his vision to others, he must explain, cajole, convince, negotiate, lie, bully, threaten to get his way, make with his actors’ limited talent, technical failures, budget restrictions.

If this is not enough to humble his artistic integrity to a compromise, then « force majeure » and an act of God himself will strike down his own omnipotence.

It is impossible to know how much Melville’s completed films differ from his original vision. How a perfect clone of it would have been received is equally impossible to tell.

As they are and we watch them, Melville’s films are U.F.O. : unidentified film objects.

Sometimes for too obvious reasons : in « Léon Morin Prêtre » (1961), Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as a priest.

But Melville’s acclaimed crime movies, too, are an unlikely cocktail, never tasted before or since : American B series and « film noir », French « nanar » -B series, or below, French film, corny but able to vie for cult status-, pulp fiction, Zen and Japanese minimalism, ancient Greek tragedy...

In front of a Melville movie, one no longer knows where he is, ignores if he has travelled backward or forward in time, is only aware never to have met a similar experience on screen.

In « Bob le flambeur » (1955), the bad boys folklore, slang and « clichés » seem so tired that the film might be a parody, but the characters’ « gravitas » and seriousness win us over and we stay glued to our chair : it should be grotesque, but we have lost any desire to laugh ; Melville’s world has engulfed us into its black hole.

The actors utter their tough boys’ corny dialogues with the solemnity of Holy Scriptures, they recite them in a priestly voice so flat and out of tune that the film transcends the usual standards of artistic achievement to turn itself into a vanguard experience.

An odd on screen mix of absurdity play and atonal music, the movie also blends naturalism and utter artificiality, as it moves back and forth between shots of Pigalle and Montmartre at night and Bob’s apartment, an overstatement, like his wardrobe, in bad taste.

« Le doulos » (1962) opening sequence similarly disrupts any sense of time and place : Paris suburbs look like a post-nuclear landscape straight from an Enki Bilal comic book.

Melville’s crime movies advance to their fateful end with deliberate slowness. They play like an accident in slow motion : there is plenty of time to see it coming, but no way to prevent it ; the resulting effect of overwhelming impotence is mesmerising.

While thrillers traditionally speed through their convoluted plots to deceive their viewers’ attention and stay one narrative twist ahead, Melville quietly arranges « Le doulos » intricate story pattern in front of his public and nevertheless manages to fool it.

Melville is a « faux lent » director : apparently slow walking, but keeping his pace and never stopping ; like Lafontaine’s fabled turtle, he easily beats his overconfident watching hares to his films finish line.