MUBI

Much of the bonus material on Criterion’s release of this somewhat forgotten French masterwork is dedicated to the debate over whose film it really is, director Jean-Pierre Melville, working independently on only his second feature, or novelist Jean Cocteau, whose stature and imposing presence on the set was surely felt by Melville, despite his own domineering personality. Indeed, taken from Cocteau’s famous novel, about the psychological mind games of a weird brother and sister and their too-close-for-comfort relationship, and infused with the kinds of poetic surrealist touches Cocteau brought to his own films, the debate usually falls in favor of the author, but considering what we know about Melville, as thorough a working man’s auteur as John Ford and Howard Hawkes, with the same artistic sensibility, it’s hard to discredit him entirely from the outcome of what is a strange and beautiful film of France’s early post-war years. Later that year Cocteau would go on to direct “Orpheus”, possibly his best film, and though he wouldn’t direct again for six years, Melville’s next film, “Bob le flambeur” predated the Nouvelle Vague by three years, proving that from this rocky collaboration sprung not only a great movie, but further benefited two legendary careers.