LE CERCLE ROUGE

Criterion/Rialto Pictures
140 min., dir. by Jean-Pierre Melville, with Alain Delon, Gian-Maria Volonte, and Yves Montand

This is my first article for Verbicide and I can’t think of a better film to start with than Jean-Pierre Meville’s Le Cercle Rouge. I blogged about it a few months back, but it just played again at the Aero in Santa Monica, and I can’t resist revisiting one of my favorite films.

The plot: on his last night before being released from prison, a gangster named Corey is sold an idea for a jewelry heist by a crooked security guard. Once out of prison, Corey assembles a three-man team for the heist. Through a chance encounter, he meets another criminal, Vogel, who, coincidentally, escaped a prisoner transport the same day that Corey was released from jail. Vogel is being pursued by a diligent police commissaire, Mattei. The third partner in the team is Jansen, a crooked ex-cop and former acquaintance of Vogel’s, whose past as a crack sharpshooter has been compromised by alcoholism.

Melville is a director that excels at telling stories with images. The characters of Le Cercle Rouge are perfect accomplices for this type of storytelling. They are cool, brave professionals of few words. On the surface they behave by the codes of their livelihoods: cop or crook or both. Underneath, they have personal conflicts that they never speak of but are shared with the audience through pictures. Mattei suffers loneliness because he has given his life to a police force that does not trust him. This tradeoff is expressed when a club owner brought in for questioning knocks over a picture of a woman on Mattei’s desk. We twice see Mattei alone in his apartment: the woman is not there; instead, there is only Mattei’s routine of running a bath and feeding his cats.

Jansen comes to believe that if he can revert from shaky alcoholic to steady sharpshooter his demons will be conquered. On two occasions we see him examine his hand for steadiness. When he is tasked with casing the jewelry store, he holds his gaze on a lock that he will later be expected to shoot from across the room. The power of telling these stories through images is that the audience shares a secret with the character: we know something in their heads that is never spoken of to others in the film.

Corey’s backstory is told in this manner as well. Upon being released from jail, he pays a visit to his former boss at home and robs him. Only the images explain this event’s subtext. Corey and the boss talk a bit in darkness before the boss turns the light on. Then we see Corey with the lavish apartment behind him, and we understand his thoughts: Corey served five years in prison and kept his mouth shut in order to protect a boss who lived in luxury and forgot about him. That’s not all — earlier, when Corey is released from jail, we see pictures of a girl among the personal belongings returned to him by the police. He tries to leave the pictures behind but the jailers make him take them. Now, in the boss’s apartment, the girl stands naked behind the bedroom door. Corey listens at the door for a moment — he knows that she is there, but he does not confront her. Instead, he takes the money from his boss’s wall safe and leaves the pictures in its place.

Corey’s final verdict on his boss is pronounced in a point-of-view shot: the boss, his back against the wall, stands next to his open safe. The girl’s pictures in the safe say two things. First, Corey knows that the boss took his girl. Second, if he wanted to, Corey could take her back as easily as he just took the money. Not a word is ever spoken about the girl, but through the images we understand what happened and how Corey feels about it.

Le Cercle Rouge is filled with moments where the images work to either tell a character’s backstory or add to what is going on in a scene. One might think that the dialogue, well-written and succinct, seems sparse when compared to the amount of dialogue in other films. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that, in Le Cercle Rouge, the dialogue and images are given equal emphasis.