#306 Le Samouraï 1967 // France // Jean-Pierre Melville Criterion Collection (LINK) At first we don’t see him. Jef (Alain Delon) had been lying on bed, unmoved, inside his drab room, dimly lighted and hardly decorated. Not till we see a puff of cigarette smoke do we realise his existence. Jef barely talked, words were rarely spoken… Continue reading #306 Le Samouraï (1967)
#218 Le Cercle Rouge 1970 // France // Jean-Pierre Melville Criterion Collection (LINK) Le Cercle Rouge holds a very special place in my heart, it’s the first Melville film I have seen, owning to the reputation that John Woo is a big fan of Melville as well as this particular film; secondly, it’s also one of… Continue reading #218 Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
#385 Army of Shadows 1969 // France // Jean-Pierre Melville Criterion Collection (LINK) Army of Shadows starts with a Nazi army marching in the Champs-Élysées, with the Arch of Triumph at the background, surround by the incoming sound of drumming and the foot stamping. The sight of soldiers in uniform marching directly towards the camera evoke the… Continue reading #385 Army of Shadows (1969)
Un Flic 1972 // France // Jean-Pierre Melville The distillation of Melville’s stylish gangster genre to a point where mannerism overrides the narrative, Un Flic was Melville’s last film before his death in 1973, and perhaps his most minimalistic, most “silent” film amidst his oeuvre. Dialogues are rarely conversated while gazings, often imbued with implicit desire,… Continue reading Un Flic (1972)
#448 Le Deuxième Souffle 1966 // France // Jean-Pierre Melville Criterion Collection (LINK) Probably the first truly Melvillian film, refined and restrained, expansive in scope yet abstracted thematically, Le Deuxième Souffle (also known as The Second Breath) features various cliches of gangster and heist films and transcends them to the level of existentialism. As in other Melville’s film,… Continue reading #448 Le Deuxième Souffle (1966)
#447 Le Doulos 1962 // France // Jean-Pierre Melville Criterion Collection (LINK) Jean-Pierre Melville had made only thirteen full-length features throughout his life, Le Doulos situated exactly at the middle of this marvelous oeuvre, continuing the commercial and critical success of the preceding film Léon Morin, Priest (1961) with the French New Wave icon Jean-Paul Belmondo, and anticipating the subsequent… Continue reading #447 Le Doulos (1962)
#572 Léon Morin, Priest 1961 // France // Jean-Pierre Melville Criterion Collection (LINK) Léon Morin, Priest does not start by introducing us to its eponymous character, the amorous priest that was played by the fresh off suffocatingly charming “New Wave” icon Jean-Paul Belmondo. Indeed the film, adapted from an award-winning autobiographical novel by Béatrix Beck (published in… Continue reading #572 Léon Morin, Priest (1961)
#150 Bob le Flambeur 1956 // France // Jean-Pierre Melville Criterion Collection (LINK) Bob le Flambeur is ended with an irony, a tease of “uselessness of effort” in which Jean-Pierre Melville particularly liked. It reminds of the human’s futility in the sense of fatalism, a view that probably stands against a gambler’s code of practice: they… Continue reading #150 Bob le Flambeur (1956)
#398 Les Enfants Terribles 1950 // France // Jean-Pierre Melville Criterion Collection (LINK) Two Heads of the Same Coin There’s a famous quote from François Truffaut commenting on the filmic adaptation of Les Enfants Terribles in which he firmly asserted “Jean Cocteau’s best novel became Jean-Pierre Melville’s best film.” I haven’t read the original novel published in 1929 by the… Continue reading #398 Les Enfants Terribles (1950)
#755 Le Silence de la Mer 1949 // France // Jean-Pierre Melville Criterion Collection (LINK) Resist Against All Odds The name of Jean-Pierre Melville has been strongly alluded to the “cool” style heist/gangster film in my mind that I almost forget his three-time ventures into war film. Indeed, excluding his first short film, Melville’s debut feature Le… Continue reading #755 Le Silence de la Mer (1949)
The Films in My Life (OnCriterion) 