© 2015 by James Clark
Jean-Pierre Melville’s reputation has largely had to do with the brilliance of cinematography and overall design of his films as feeding into depictions of an underworld of remarkable panache. Looking at the general commentary this dazzlingly eccentric artist has elicited, we find considerable zeal for the paradox of resolved often homicidal law-breakers taking inspiration from a code of honor comprising sensuous poise as prominently rising above betraying fellow practitioners. In a film like Le Samourai (1967) that celebrated larger-than-mainstream-life surprise has been richly conveyed by the handsome solitude of a handsomely youthful Alain Delon in the title role. In the film (Le Deuxieme Souffle [1966]) confronting us here, however, those thrilling contrarian inspirations are refracted in such a way as to result in a disclosure far from the standard version.
Melville has assisted us in withholding vigorous celebration here by bringing forward a jail break episode at the outset that recalls Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956). In that earlier depiction we also had a daring duet (our trio soon becomes a duet) composed of a very young player and a decidedly less young partner. Whereas in the Bresson film, the escapees were involved in the anti-Nazi French underground (the elder especially committed to cogent law and order), in the Melville film the escapees were intent on increasing the crime rate. Moreover, and of special significance, whereas the elder statesman in A Man Escaped was well suited to the challenges of physical strength, agility and guile amidst the angular rooftops of the jail at night, the senior partner in crime of interest to us here is strikingly in physical and emotional distress and clumsy in his procedures (being lifted by the young man as he clings piteously to a roof’s edge). The spare, geometric forms amidst that latter murky and richly vertiginous scene of desperation do not fail to add a strange lustre to the event. But whereas in Bresson’s austere account of an accomplishment of heart the setting produces a quiet intensification of a hard and essential mystery within which the players cohere to dramatic plenitude, in Melville’s scrutiny the atmospheric beauties point up the less than sterling occasion. The latter two then run through woodland; and once again there is one painfully out-of-shape laggard who, on their converging upon a freight train has the damnedest time getting a bead on the open door of a boxcar and, when finally able to cling to it, has to be lifted to safety by the younger escapee.
Our title here could slip by us as anticipating a surge of vigor on the part of a protagonist who was ripe for recovering former glories or even surpassing them. But nothing like an out-of-shape dude being carried away from complete failure by a kid to put in play another look at the operation of second wind. Let’s posit the rather sneaky notion of a coming to life of his fan base (and at least one detractor) as, on the occasion of his returning to their orbit, reviving in themselves—in the almost total absence of grace on the part of the big name, Gu (something of an anti-climax in itself)—the rare magic that once took place when Gu was more than he is now. That would be an interesting tempering befalling the course of true innovation. Let’s see where we can go with it.
Two set piece actions follow right on the heels of the set piece overture at the prison, pertaining to his charisma quotient. (The young benefactor had hopped back to the forest almost immediately upon getting the ageing guy into a cruising speed and offering him a cigarette to calm his nerves. Could we infer that this anonymous athlete— who, we learn later, perishes by leaping off a cliff when hopelessly surrounded by police—is the first of a series of figures inspired to think big by a presence disconcertingly small?) The first vignette giving some definite shape to the narrative takes place in a Marseille night club offering a floor show of attractive ladies dancing to a cool bebop quintet. The sedate inspiration of the self-restrained musicians has failed to lift the dancers to their level of commitment. At the bar the owner and an arrestingly long-in-the-tooth associate allude to a criminal coup scheduled for late December. The careful senior moots the whole thing falling through, a notion which unnerves the paunchy impresario, Paul Ricci. Returning to his office away from all the limping fun, he’s confronted with a right-hand man who’s bound for Paris, to deal with one Jacques (“that bastard Jacques the lawyer”) who has complicated one of their profit centres. “I need you here, Jennot… You’re indispensible here…” The freer spirit than Paul, confidently striding to the door, leaves him with, “No one’s indispensible, ciao!”—a notion already up for grabs and headed for wide-ranging consideration in what follows in the films of Michael Mann. What immediately follows is a jump cut to a Paris supper club also suffused with cool, small-group jazz with its complex harmonies and rhythms. That self-same Jacques, working, as we meet him, as the Maitre de, tells the woman in charge—plugging away at the bar on an adding machine in her cheetah coat—that Gu is on the loose. “Ten years ago,” she feels compelled to say, “he told me to let him die in peace… I was even afraid he’d kill himself.” There is, in this moment of surprise, about her eyes and the set of her handsome face, more the facing of a challenge than a savoring of nostalgia. This level of involvement after such an absence would seem to evoke the vicinity of what Mann, many years later, referred to as “cosmic coincidence.” Does such music of the spheres still work magic for Gu and Manouche?
We get a pretty good hint that real magic doesn’t live there anymore when the man who once opted for dying in peace drops by her handsome home (formerly the home of her and Jacques; and before that the home of someone named Pelquier—she still officially Mrs. Simone Pelquier) during a moment when two thugs (one being Jennot, the exponent of no one indispensible—a notion to keep in mind) have, first of all, temporarily disposed of her bartender, Alban, who was to make sure (sort of) that she get home safely, and then begun to eat away at her assets. “You must be fed up with this crap [that being a basic trajectory of Gu]. We can put an end to it… We’re not greedy” [5 million each]. That Manouche is not really that fed up with rough trade may be inferred by the way she first greets them entering her boudoir. “Aren’t those rods a little heavy?” At her door Gu notes that something is amiss and addresses this irregularity in a manner you’d have to call irregular at best. Finding the door ajar and Alban on the floor he quickly ducks back beyond the threshold. Then we see him hugging the floor, and peering in (a sort of variant of “on all fours,” that no-no in the eyes of Bob le Flambeur). Soon he ducks back, as a mouse would, with the appearance of one of the invaders to check on Alban. Only when the coast is clear, confirmed by more crawling, does he enter the danger zone, his gun trumping their guns in pocket. The man on the floor is freed from being handcuffed and slugs one of the defenceless intruders in the gut. Was this part of a lesson from the past or was it a matter of backsliding? For his part, Gu drives his unarmed captives on to the highway in their car and shoots them on the move, leaving the bodies and car on a side road. Manouche drives up in another car and off they go to keep the magic flowing.
There is another significant tuning factor we have not yet brought forward, a figure, unlike everyone else in sight, firmly rooted in the overground. Inspector Blot is not simply the only player not at risk of going to jail but the only one with a sense of humor. In fact, as the interrogation of possible witnesses to the murder of Jacques in the workplace very soon after his raising the spectre of Gu proceeds, he can’t resist smoothly and even warmly running with the possibilities of irony in going through the motions of specification which in fact would find no takers. He asks Alban, rhetorically, if he shot Jacques out of jealousy. “Always the joker, Inspector…” the tall and grave and perhaps with a quiet sense of humor bartender replies. “You know I don’t use a gun anymore” [we having seen him whip out a pistol and drill one of the three assailants]. Blot quickly plays along, with, “Because all your enemies are dead.” That aside, Blot delivers a 102 mph fastball in zapping a roster playing it safe by keeping out of questions of justice. “Not everyone’s born with an inquiring mind.” By way of a provocation to someone on hand who has an outside chance of proving his irony to be too inclusive, he remarks, “And now you’re alone, Manouche. Too bad the ante is so high.”
Manouche soon appears to be, despite having a deep and well-modulated timbre of voice and thus akin to Blot, not (or no longer) a strong candidate for mastering an “ante so high” when, a couple of days after the contract murder, she, in the driver’s seat, muses to Alban on the drive home, “Jacques kept asking me to go away with him. Maybe he really did love me.” Alban says nothing here, exactly pitch perfect. And thus we have an entryway into Blot’s equal as a man who walks the walk and talks the talk. Early appearances to the contrary, and far from a mere bartender and criminal combatant of uneven quality, Alban—and even during the early skirmishes—emits a presence so far removed from personal advantage as to act, within the ranges of a tribe of self-seeking schemers, as an arrestingly unique altruistic force. (Melville has given him the name of a sainted martyr.)
Alban has more on his plate than Manouche’s volatile menu of patron saints. (He had provided a suit of dress clothes for Gu, and the makings of a champagne supper [at a modest flat in an unsung part of Paris called Montrouge—a district formerly the home of a number of monasteries—which he had recommended as an effective hideout] in response to Manouche’s wanting to have a close look of the former man in her life who has left her with vestiges of a sophisticated disposition which was probably more coherent years ago. At the door she begins with, “C’est moi…” He caresses her face and they thrill to a warm kiss. [Only later do we find—in a conveyance nearly unintelligible and fraught with a possible exigency to hide Gu’s having a love interest on top of his escape route—that Manouche is his sister. During the meal she quips, “We’ve been crooks since we were kids!”] She obliquely touches upon her anxiety, about how frighteningly far away from being kids they now are, with this morale booster about bringing off a clean escape. “If we can’t get you out we’re in sad shape…” Instead of taking that as a kick-off to a new and disinterestedly youthful dawning, he slides into self-absorbed geezer sensationalism. “In any case I’m never going back there” [Neil, in Mann’s Heat, putting this thought far more emphatically]. Manouche emotes, “What about me? What’ll happen to me?” Then he hands her this sob story: “Manouche, don’t you understand? You know what happened. I gambled and I lost. No one was to blame. Now they’re after me. They always will be…” She gently touches his hand, displaying a wedding band—from somewhere—in addition to her love. He covers her hand with his other hand.) He, Alban, turns up on the morning after, picking up her white gloves, “so she won’t go crazy looking for them.” Then he tries to make the best of the crazy one-time self-starter. “She’s leaving,” he tells Gu. “She’ll find you a hideout. Gu then lists two complaints. “I know a place in Italy. But you need at least something” [in the way of a nest egg]. Also this: his having to avenge the hood, Jo Ricci, Paul’s brother, who sicked the two intruders upon Manouche. “I’m not leaving without setting it straight. I’m not gonna let Jo Ricci take over.” Impassive Alban (whom he had ridiculed for not remaining crazily on edge and thus being taken by surprise by Jo’s less than formidable staff) quietly asks, by way of a bid to induce another level of getting real in a figure who long ago ushered him into a close encounter with a reality unique and endlessly developing—in the right hands (his now being somewhat right, Gu’s being sweaty)—“That stuff still sticks in your craw, eh?” After an abortive attempt (with Alban loyally assisting as driver) to add to the death toll, Gu returns to his studio, flops on to the bed and assumes a fetal position. “It’s best if I leave you alone,” Alban remarks, never betraying in body language or verbal language that he’s witnessing death throes from someone he’s far surpassed.
Getting back to the urban zone of Paris, Alban needs to take a constitutional and there he comes across someone we begin to realize constitutes something of a soulmate, namely, Inspector Blot. “Mind if I join you?” the latter asks cordially. “If you like,” the de facto free-lance proceeds. Blot asking about “your lovely boss,” he first uses a phrase rich in directionality—“She’s gone.” He adds, “She’s had enough of all this…” [So, of course, has he; but his understanding-in-progress does not allow of simple moves]. Blot asks if he’s staying, and Alban calmly declares, “I have to take care of Manouche’s affairs.” Blot running past him the mystery of the whereabouts of less-and-less mystery-man, Gu, Alban remarks (somewhat wryly), “He’s like a wild boar. Hard to track down…” Then he shows another trace of his own (almost undetectable) volatility, passing across his tall and pensive stance. “And he’ll kill two or three of your dogs in the process.” Blot, however, does detect the moves away from dog-eat-dog athleticism. He begins with, “I’m not thrilled with hunting a man like him.” Alban returns the signal of affinities between them. “I suppose not.” The situation becoming beyond what he can at this point handle with confidence, Alban backs away. “I’m going to cross here.” Blot, as usual, is intuitively quick with a bon mot. “Be careful crossing…” “Good luck, Inspector” is the pleasantry (and then some) from the conflicted and endangered exponent of wild and, if not enemy of boars, no longer a zealous acolyte. Blot, ever the comedian and ever the foe of grossness, sends him off with, “Long live the crooks!” [In the last analysis meaning contrarian skeptics like themselves].
At this juncture, Alban and Blot disappear somewhat to allow us to savor their remarkable subversiveness and to allow Gu to descend into the purgatory that suits him. Manouche makes it down to Marseille and her cousin in his houseboat docked at Marseille’s Vieux Port. Her splendid Hermes scarf is illustrated with medieval clerical icons, Alban’s level of deluxe discreet service getting sidetracked in that way. (He had given his special revolver to Gu on the latter’s departure [on a series of crowded buses with wide-open spaces beyond the window].) She does, however, set Gu up in a hideaway in the process of which he comes across that aforementioned scheme centered upon Paul by which, for killing a motorcycle escort to a shipment of plutonium, he will garner 200 million francs—the “at least something.” In the prelude to this challenge, he rudely ridicules one of his partners in crime as being a gypsy. In the exhilarating aftermath of the heist, performed almost entirely without a word, Gu comes over to him and, with regained steady timbre tells him, “It was a pleasure working with you.” That same young gangster is soon seen with Jo Ricci in making plans to help Paul get away from the guillotine after Blot—who had near the outset told Jo, regarding Gu’s being a skilled menace, “I’m paid to think. Sometimes I can’t stop”—had suckered Gu into a taped remark (thinking to be having a contretemps with a crime syndicate) implicating himself and Paul in the platinum (temporary) success. During Gu’s kidnapping by the police-cum-hoodlums he becomes nearly hysterical in insisting he had nothing to do with a putative double-cross of the insider who tipped off Paul about the opportunity and its vulnerable features. During the subsequent constraints at the Marseille Police Headquarters (with Blot in a more abrasive and triumphant register) he becomes absolutely hysterical as portrayed as having ratted on Paul to save his own skin. Injuring himself by way of this abrogation of principles of self-control, he lands in a hospital where Manouche and Alban might be able to do their (varied) stuff. (On the way to this climax of sorts, both Blot and Alban return to the screen to set in relief the ways of offbeat integrity within a swirl of brittle and largely impotent predation. Protesting the recording of his presumed conversation with fellow killers and thieves, Gu yells out, “That’s illegal!” “Everything’s legal!” Blot the upbeat improviser states, his voice ringing with the discovery of a new law, a new leeway, and a new approach to a planet of pests. [During the actual heist, the contrast between the stunning, wide-open spaces of the rocky heights of Provence and the nervous insularity of the hoods—one of whom is momentarily frozen into staring at some ants at his feet—points the way to a direction going somewhere and a direction going nowhere.]) Reading the news (“Gustave Minta Names Associate to Save Himself!”) back in Paris, Manouche is speechless and depressed. Alban declares, “He didn’t talk, I’m sure of it. That’s just to turn everyone against him” [this being a film including those who can see an upside to mass murder and grand theft]. “What do you believe?” he challenges her. “I don’t care. To me Gu is Gu. My Gu…” He gives her a solemn, disappointed stare. “So we go help him,” the student of friendship (as distinct from lust) suggests. “Let’s wait a few days,” the survivor pivots. “We can’t get near him now.” Another disappointed look from Alban, in fact the last we hear of him materially (though not effectively). As if to maintain that the feats of inventive composure on the part of Blot and Alban are latent in the air gracing the environs of old Marseille (which Paul refers to as a “hellhole”), we have another outlaw, Orloff, a friend of Manouche’s cousin and the man who tells Paul that his plan is a disaster in the making. His information about the plan reaches Gu by way of the old houseboat captain who feels he must give the cash-starved, emigrating Public Enemy #1 a shot for solvency. Orloff becomes a person of interest to Jo for having opened the door to his brother Paul’s downfall. Along with the gypsy kid and the fourth member of the somewhat impromptu gang (known as Pascal, no less—neatly dressed but no model for anything but futility) Jo typically tries to lean on Orloff to kill Gu in the event of his escaping once again. The outnumbered but far from overpowered free-lancer (less evolved than Alban—an array of discernment on the move in our vicinity) tells them, “This kind of talk just gets people worked up [none in fact more worked up than Gu]. You talk too much… I’m not your servant.”
As it happens it is time for yet more of the extremis of Gu, the two uneasily coexisting universes being already well illuminated. Melville has led the unwary to regard that “anti-hero” as the workplace of profound deliberations. His death march is a melodramatic sack of candy, leaving us with an overload of sticky perversity as pertaining to those few players in sight who actually deliver an “inquiring mind.” The epigraph had warned us, “A man is given but one right at birth: to choose his own death [as including the way he lives]. But if he chooses [from out of that way he lives] because he’s weary of life, then his entire existence has been without meaning.” Escaping from hospital by reason of the man on guard flirting with a nurse, he encounters Manouche having hied to the southern safe-house provided by her cousin; and there, in their farewell moment, we hear him say, “I can’t stand it anymore! You deserved better. I never should have gone to Paris…” Manouche quietly and sadly maintains, “Yes, you should have,” looking, beyond perfection, to the best that was in them and realizing that what once held a quirky validity had become coarsely deranged.
The denouement discovers how shabby that best had become for Gu. He (like hundreds of others populating crime sagas) hides out in the back seat of the Marseille Police Inspector’s car, eventually has the opportunity: to stick Alban’s pistol into the neck of an official proud of a reputation for torture to accomplish a self-incriminating confession; to force a written statement headed for an open letter to the press (and also the Minister of Justice), clearing up the nature of the so-called betrayal and the nature of Marseille crime detection. His executing the small-town Inspector as he speeds the vehicle along the highway becomes the early stage of a jag of self-congratulatory viciousness driven by a vapid and selective sense of justice. He intercepts (knocking him cold) Orloff’s campaign to clear his name in Jo’s eyes, converting it to a vendetta upon the latter for messing with Manouche. The latter, beholding the presumptuously self-important killing machine Gu has become, emits at their final farewell a tear—both shabbily bathetic and solidly pathetic. Barging in on Jo and the two colleagues from the platinum days—a pistol in each hand as if he were a movie poster—he shoots off his mouth: “You sit there like assholes… Shut your trap, I’ll do the talking…I wasn’t talking to you Jo. [Referring to the latter with his former teammates] You’re looking at the scum of the earth! This man’s a jackal!” He orders Jo to turn around and shoots him in the back. The ensuant gun battle leaves both colleagues dead, Gu mortally wounded and finished off at the arrival of Blot and his infantry.
Blot discovers that notepad with the facts so urgent for Gu’s incomplete sense of integrity. (“I’m not leaving till I clear my name!”) And though he hears from the dying man the word “Manouche,” when he meets her in the street outside of the battleground he denies that the famous man said anything. “Go back to Paris,” he advises her, with a view to real sophistication. More rather enigmatic action follows, from the man suffused with a high ante, in the form of tossing that dictated justification on the ground and then, as a second thought, drawing attention to it to the newshounds who had gathered to cover such a major event. Alban had already embarked on “crossing” to an area less agitated and more active than Gu could muster. Gu’s gesture of clearing his name would be a surprisingly low priority. When we first saw her Manouche had just been to a movie, which she described to Jacques as “not bad.” Waiting for her to be more critical of facile melodrama could be a waste of time. Or maybe not. She had told her confreres, “We have to dance to Blot’s tune.” Blot’s pulling out a fractured cigarette at the end of the wild day (tracing all the way back to Gu’s soother in the box car) confirms that he is far from omnipotent. Perhaps the early flare-up in Paul’s night-club of the optics of Cocteau’s Surrealist reverie, Beauty and the Beast (1946) anticipates not only Gu, the beast who “can’t stand it anymore” and Manouche, the beauty en route to a “not bad” scene; but also the volatility and wit of the human heart. In a second such apparition, we have a diminutive choreographer (or ringmaster) putting Paul’s chorines (with their surreally long cigarette holders) through their paces—“Too slow, Yvette!” Jacques Demy’s Lola, the gossamer motions of which bringing to the fore Blot’s amazing (perhaps quite recent) carefree qualities in the face of what could be most discouraging.
Paramount to Second Wind, it could be maintained, is the task of withstanding the general invisibility of rigorous endeavor to understand (of the workings, that is, of an inquiring mind), when the bulk of one’s species wants to wallow in goo on the order of Gu’s rapacious self-assertiveness, with readiness to trot out any number of showy humanitarian platitudes. That being so, Melville’s great film is as fresh and necessary as anything being produced now. (Speaking of now, let’s let go with the ways of newsmen and problematics of today, specifically, by hiving to a Vanity Fair article, out this month [August 2015], concerning the not exactly Public Enemy #1 figure, artist, Dustin Yellin, an exuberant and insightful producer of sculptures consisting of human forms comprising low-iron glass enclosing figments of cut-out paper images. These creations, as photographed in the foyer of Lincoln Centre’s State Theatre on the occasion of a New York City Ballet season this past February, bristle with kinetic surprise overcoming a sensibility laden with myriad gobs of leadenness. But the tenor, typical of Vanity Fair in its strenuous attempt to register the lustre it showed in the early twentieth century, has no time for reflection. [The artist was at his first Balanchine program—in fact, his first ballet—but it was all about him.] The story brings us bon mots from “critic and Museum of Modern Art poet laureate [no less], Kenneth Goldsmith, gushing, in fact, “Now we know what public art can look like. Dustin’s going to be bigger than the art world. He could become a major pop figure.” The title of this glimpse of noteworthy but inadequate creative energy draws upon the young celebrity’s ominous and unwitting bid to obviate Demy’s warning, in Peau d’Ane, “Life is not as easy as you think,” to wit, “The Host of Utopia.”)
