Belmondo and Melville is showing April and May, 2020 on MUBI in the United States.
In 1961 Jean-Pierre Melville released Léon Morin, Priest—a deeply French film set during the Second World War—and in 1963 came his follow-up, Le doulos, a modern-day crime movie with American influences. In the year between those two films, Serge Gainsbourg released an album called Serge Gainsbourg N° 4. The record is notable for shifting the singer a little further away from his French troubadour roots and towards more contemporary, rock’n’roll sounds. The album features a song with a title in English, “Intoxicated Man”—a jazzy, Hammond organ-backed number in which Gainsbourg uses the English words “smoking” and “living room.” These little touches show the creep of American influences on French culture: Gainsbourg is affecting the cool nonchalance of a modern man, with the help of these particular lifestyle signifiers.
A year later, Jean-Paul Belmondo also uses the word “living room” in Melville’s Le doulos, while scoping out a location. The word sticks out like a sore thumb, as French already has a perfectly adequate word for living room of its own (salon), which he conspicuously doesn’t use. That element of language, however, is in complete accordance with Melville’s Americanism in Le doulos—both textual and implied. This is after all, a tough cops ‘n’ robbers caper, a hard-bitten drama with figures smoking cigarettes while ordering Scotch at a bar. This aspect sits almost jarringly alongside the French setting of the movie, with its ham sandwiches and Citroen 2CV cars. At the heart of this film, Belmondo incarnates the essence of the American anti-hero. His obvious starriness, and the use that Melville makes of him in this lead role and in Léon Morin, Priest, show that Melville was learning from the United States how to use star-power to transcend the limitations of film.
In an interview from the time about Léon Morin, Priest, Melville is asked about his reasons for counter-casting Belmondo, an actor previously known mostly for his roles as a young delinquent, in such films as Godard’s Breathless or Claude Sautet’s Classe tous risques. Melville replies that Belmondo was the only choice for him, because in essence he is the only male movie star in France, with sex appeal, range and virility. Pressed on the point, he comments that the United States has many such actors (perhaps he had in mind someone like Paul Newman or Warren Beatty), but in France there are none. It’s difficult to imagine such a thing now, but Melville was probably right. Alain Delon was also emerging at the time, of course—and would soon figure in Melville’s work himself—but the industry itself was a little short on hungry young pin-ups.
Belmondo’s role in Léon Morin, Priest is certainly a singular one, which rests in great part on his sex appeal. The film centers on a young widow, Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), and her life in a small mountainside town during the Second World War, as a mother to a young child, as an office worker, and as a woman undergoing a crisis of faith and sexuality when she (along with many other local women rendered single by wartime) becomes besotted with a young clergyman. Perhaps Melville was thinking of Montgomery Clift in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess as an antecedent for this young, devout, handsome priest. Certainly Belmondo cuts about as surprising a figure as Clift when dressed in full cassock: both actors stand for a certain image of modern male youth, and their natural beauty and sexuality are significantly reined in by such vestments. Belmondo’s role in Léon Morin, Priest is a hard one, since he must at once delineate Léon’s religious fervor, and stand as a sexual icon, an object of desire at the heart of the movie. This means that his performance must be passive, allowing the women in the movie to imbue his figure with their own desire, and allowing us also to read him as a magnetic, mysterious character. Belmondo does this in a number of ways, partly by moderating his body language; the film finds him far more constricted than in such films as, say, Pierrot le fou, where he jumps and skips about the place with boyish, acrobatic grace. At times he roughly seizes Barny by the middle, or grabs a hatchet from her (in the film’s most sexually loaded scene), which gives us a tantalizing glimpse into this young man who is perhaps trying to control his impulses. Belmondo also modulates his voice a great deal, often talking in hushed tones that seem to let us into a certain intimacy with him. Finally, Belmondo is aided in this depiction by Melville, who places the actor at once at the heart of the movie and perversely decenters him.
It’s a while before we see Belmondo appear in Léon Morin, Priest. The film’s first scenes are taken up by Barny, who is the protagonist and narrator of the movie. We therefore see a fair bit through her subjectivity. Emmanuelle Riva is very fine in the role, but we are nevertheless, because of the film’s title, and knowing who is in it, waiting to see the star. But before this Melville gives a cauldron of roiling politics and sexuality; Barny has a passionate lesbian crush on her superintendent at work (which rather falls by the wayside as the film progresses). When Morin does appear, he is filmed from a distance, from on high, kneeling; he enters the confessional; and only then, along with Barny (come to taunt the young chaplain), do we discover Morin in close-up, in this setting of enforced closeness. He is extraordinarily alluring. Melville depicts Barny’s turbulent emotions by spiraling around the two as they talk, removing the cloister between them, and giving us fine frontal and profile shots of Morin. Barny is compelled, as are we, but it takes her a while to realize that he is handsome. Belmondo therefore has to carry all of this displacement; he is not an agent but a vector; he is objectified, in a way that, for instance, Brando was in A Streetcar Named Desire. This is highly unusual. Furthermore, he is absent for long stretches, but always the film returns to him: he has to cast a spell over us with his magnetism, while being at a remove. When the movie ends on Morin, rather than Barny, it feels natural: this man has come to be an obsession for her and for us, and yet we know so little of him. It feels like he has somehow won, and Barny has been defeated in her attempted conquest of him.
Belmondo’s protagonist in Le doulos is similarly unknowable, at least right until the end. Again, although he is the title role, it’s a while before we see him appear. The first character to show up is Maurice Faugel, a young thief, filmed in a magnificent tracking shot over the movie’s ritzy opening credits. Once more, Belmondo’s magnetism is held in reserve, so that when he appears his charisma can surprise us and draw us in. Faugel is a crook recently out of prison, working on a new break-in when he is apprehended by the police and shot at; he suspects SIlien (Belmondo) of being a police informant, or doulos, to use the movie’s slang. Belmondo, then, is once again tasked with playing a character of great ambiguity—even more so in this film, since the movie rests on the question of who exactly Silien is working for.
Melville’s use of Belmondo is startling: he makes his young star a counterpart to the film’s other criminals. Silien is smooth, contained, cool at all times, handsome, modern—in contrast, Faugel (played by Serge Reggiani) looks and feels like an old-school French vandal, particularly in the film’s prologue during which he discusses past crimes with an old accomplice. This contrast between Silien and his surroundings is played up even further when Belmondo, looking a million dollars, comes face to face with the overlord Nuttheccio, played by Michel Piccoli. Piccoli has a bluff everyman demeanor; he looks older than his years, and he brilliantly shows how Nutheccio’s mask of coolness soon slips in the presence of Silien, of whom he is afraid. By contrast, even when Silien is himself endangered later on, at his lowest ebb he maintains his cool, not even breaking sweat while injured by a gun.
Belmondo, of course, is playing a trope: the hard-boiled antihero; the smooth criminal who can rock a trench coat and who pauses for a sip of drink mid-operation. But, as in Léon Morin, Priest, his star wattage is what the movie relies on to sell us this idea. Without Belmondo’s star persona, for instance, it’s impossible to pull off the scene where Silien obtains information from Nutheccio’s girlfriend Fabienne: after he tells her, simply, that he wants to sleep with her, she immediately fixes a time and place with him for one hour later. This would be almost comical without Belmondo’s assured presence in the lead role: this is somebody for whom everything (or almost everything, for the hero must be fallible) works like clockwork.
As with Morin, we are afforded tantalizing glimpses into Silien’s persona: we are given some scenes where Morin abandons himself to playing piano, for instance, which are matched in Le doulos by a beautiful and surprising scene where Silien, a lonesome figure who gives nothing away, takes time to stroke the muzzle of a fine black horse in his stables. We can only guess at who he is.
These elements of performance and of star power feel strikingly American in their usage. In Belmondo, Melville finds a young figure who is extraordinarily inviting, but he places him at a remove, teasingly, at arm’s length from other characters and from us. The ambiguity that he derives from his leading man—the way his charisma allows him to hold back while drawing us in, relies on a sort of sex appeal probably not seen before in French film. Leading men had existed before, of course—from the hulking Jean Gabin to suave Yves Montand, via disposable pretty boys such as Gérard Philipe. But the bruised and brooding young male lead—still boyish yet troubled, sexual, handsome—cut a new figure. That cool, distant, ironic persona that Belmondo adopts in Le doulos, drawing most likely on the work of such actors as Clift or James Dean, is just one more aspect of the Americanism that contributes to making Melville’s work so startling.