#73
Post
by zedz » Wed Feb 18, 2009 5:33 pm
I watched Le Deuxieme Souffle a couple of days ago and really loved it. I remember now that when I first fell in love with Le Samourai many many years ago, reading up on Melville suggested that this was the next best bet. L'Armee des ombres, which I'd also seen and loved, was sort of critical terra incognita at the time, though it would probably be the darling nowadays. So t was great to finally catch up with the film and not be disappointed.
Where Le Samourai is stripped back and exquisitely minimal, Le Deuxieme Souffle is dense and detailed, like L'Armee, though still lean and reticent. I was impressed by how the magnificent heist sequence was staged like the big climax it would have been in most other films, even though its function here is more like another staging post in a larger plot - there's still an hour or so to go after it's concluded, even though it feels like it was the moment the film has been building up to, and it pays off dramatically in those terms.
The two obvious comparisons are with Criterion's other policiers of 2008, Le Doulos and Classe tous risques. The Melville was very impressively engineered, but it felt rather too mechanical in its plotting for my comfort, with ironies falling into place all too fatalistically. The Sautet film, which has a lot of similarities with Le Deuxieme Souffle, including Ventura, was enjoyable enough, but seemed very thin alongside the later film, lacking the dramatic muscle that Melville's set pieces bring to the table. And in my opinion Melville also tops Sautet in terms of the less heightened, 'ordinary' scenes, such as the lovely sequence in which Ventura travels to his new hideout on local buses.