Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Anoushka Slater While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Scotty Burke It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

larrywest42-610-618957 I don't speak French, but the acting and the subtitled dialog are outstanding throughout.The plot and each situation, each conversation, is completely credible, and follows naturally, yet not predictably, from what came before.A note to younger audiences: there are no highly choreographed fight scenes or stylized gun battles (though there are fights and shooting). No throw-away romantic interest. No noticeable special effects. No wisecracking. No mood music telling you what to feel.So, if you're used to recent Hollywood fare, it may seem slow.But, to this noir-lover, it feels fresh, yet as gritty as a run-down apartment in a hundred year-old building.

Bob Taylor I'll start with a quote from Alphonse Boudard, regarding the tendency to make crime films like Greek tragedy: Melville wants to remake the Atreidae among criminals. He means that these stories of desperate men settling scores between themselves in the bloodiest fashion possible (I lost count of the corpses in this picture) can't carry the weight of classical tragedy. The excessive length of the film (Le Samourai clocks in at 100 minutes, Un flic at 94--these stories are not much less complicated than Deuxieme souffle), means there must be scenes that drag on, until the dramatic effect is totally lost. The platinum heist seems to last forever, and it is meant to be the one big suspense moment.The actors don't do well in general. Pierre Zimmer, playing Orloff, is given silly lines about what he has to do with Gu, if there's betrayal, but he comes off so stiff you want to fast-forward through his scenes. Lino Ventura acts well, has lots of charisma, but looks old--and his age is commented on by the younger thugs. Christine Fabrega is so terribly stiff and sculptural, you wonder how she was hired to play Manouche. It seems Simone Signoret was intended for the part, but dropped out--a great pity. Signoret would have delivered the vitality and strength that are so conspicuously lacking in Fabrega. There's only one stand-out performance: Paul Meurisse is so elegant and smart as Blot that the story takes off every time he comes into the frame. If you have seen Les Diaboliques, you'll know how good he is.The camera work is mediocre; a washed-out b/w that looks more like television than Melville's great pictures of the 50's. Le deuxieme soufflé is one of the lower points in this man's output.

Milan Jean-Pierre Melville and his long standing infatuation with Hollywood "Film Noir",which he was the most devoted follower of, in entire history of French cinema, produced the whole line of best French crime pictures ever. In this one, he's in absolute top form on this neatly constructed, no nonsense caper film. Building a story of old school criminals with sense of criminal honesty and honor, around 800 million heist, Melville, tells many stories, from human relations, betrayals and greed, to love and friendship that will go all the way.The dialogs are great. Witty police inspector Comissaire Blot, beautifully portrayed by Paul Meurisse and Lino Ventura's Gustave "Gu" Minda,play the game of cat and mouse with no unnecessary talk, and no unnecessary action. Melville devoted a lot of attention to detail, and this film deservedly looks like a crime-action documentary, with no plot holes or "how the hell this or that could have happened" types of questions for the viewer, which is very important for mature audiences that appreciate classic films. I think that this may be the best film Melville made in the 60's, even better than "Army of Shadows" or the "Samourai",and was the last he made in his own studio that burned up during the production of "Samourai" in 1967, which may explain the possibilities he had, to devote time and attention to details. If you appreciate a good crime picture, be sure not to miss it.

jzappa Why do I always care about thieves in heist films, no matter how bad they are? As is common in Jean-Pierre Melville's later films, this meticulously crafted crime film opens with a title card that epigrammatically sets out a foreboding epigram that molds ostensible meaning into the action: "A man is given but one right at birth: to choose his own death. But if he chooses because he's weary of his own life, then his entire existence has been without meaning." It's invariably inhibiting to totally apply these fatalistic, existential aphorisms to the films that thus proceed, but they tend to cast a distinct outlook across the film. I'm not so sure that this slow, deliberate caper, or any of Melville's others for that matter, seeks all of the indications of this quote, but its pretext of fate, mortality and grim, solipsistic judgment corresponds with the essential themes of the film.Like Le Cercle Rouge, Le Deuxième Soufflé is a nominal saga, an antithetical and composite film in which the life seems as if to impose and simultaneously exhale. Ventura's performance is both innate and disciplined by his claustrophobic settings. There are several instances set within moving cars, less to expand the atmosphere than to show the inhibition of the space they employ.What frustrates and somewhat detaches me however is that Melville never seems to give his characters any involved cognitive measure. They're characterized and assessed by the black and white of their behavior. Gu is a ruthless, intractable and curtailed presence who gains recognition, even from Inspector Blot, another wonderfully named character, played by Paul Meurisse, who respects his deadly actions because he eventually complies with and doesn't veer from his dang "code."Much of this 1966 cops-and-robbers film can be explained just in terms of its distilled preoccupation with the reference to the conventions regarding the treatment of Chandler, McBain, W.R. Burnett, Jim Thompson, stylish Hollywood crime dramas, and classic American gangster pictures. Melville's films in this mode have the element of photogenics, conformity to modern ideas and models nourished by a shadowy nonchalance and the characters' affectedly memorialized mannerisms. For instance when a dutiful thug prepares to meet the other gang members, casing the place first, but also anticipating the blanket preconditions of the scene. This dogmatic behavior underscores the salutary definitions of these characters, their movements having a textbook role. You can also see Melville's influence on Tarantino's Jackie Brown when the thug is dramatically pre-performing the differing poses of the impending standoff. Also, it's not until Gu changes into clothing more mindfully echoing that of a gangster that he is allowed to free himself from being so secretive and concealed.The sullen, inflamed and exceedingly conventionalized quality of this typified film conveys Melville's immersion in the downbeat deliberation of the play of loyalty and destined disloyalty. With this transcendent crime film, as per Melville's usual, complete with another great title, Second Wind, Melville pushes the tonal qualities and gray scale of the image to new levels. The movie's preoccupation with issues of fellowship, abnormally all-consuming professionalism, silence, and duplicity reverberates with Melville's own distinction as an egocentric, tight-lipped, fringe-dwelling figure in French cinema, who despite his success never truly declared participation or involvement in any founded generation or evolution of filmmakers.