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Un Flic, coming at the tail end of Melville's career, leaps across the screen with such conviction and such tremendous and terrific understanding of movie-making that it appears as if the whole career of the great French director, and indeed the entire history of cinema itself, which he is but a small bead upon its infinitesimal string of road, came crashing to this single point in time with no other purpose in its devising than to make Un Flic happen. And that's the very and sole quality that makes a movie a true masterpiece in my eyes.To say the films of Melville are not going to be to everybody's taste is an understatement. His crime flicks are of a whole other ilk and order than the quirky crimedies that attempt to pass for such in our days. His script is not loaded with exposition, flashbacks, flashforwards or snappy, self-conscious dialogue that is nothing more than a meaningless collection of quips. His direction is not that of a slick and glossy music video. Indeed Melville soars above most directors dabbling with the genre in the terrible post-Tarantino genre wasteland with such towering majesty that it's as if the past twenty years never happened.As with previous Melville films, Un Flic is distant, cold and clinical. Not so much the director detached from the movie he's making, rather the characters detached from the world they inhabit. A world as grey, dreary and sullen as the faces of the characters, one reflected in the other. The pace is minimalist and monotonous, the movie plodding along in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, as if it does not progress at all, yet it does. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance, the plot laconic in what it reveals as much as the dialogue, yet it flows towards its inevitable and cold end in an unnoticeable succession of undeviating changes. A phone-call, a newspaper clipping, a man setting down to eat in a restaurant. Before you know it a man is getting shot.And as with previous Melville films, Un Flic revolves around the set-piece. As with the now famous heist sequence in LE CERCLE ROUGE, the two main set-pieces in Un Flic, a bank robbery at the beginning and a train heist after the middle point, are orchestrated with surgical precision, with deliberation, method and meticulous attention to detail. Both in the acts required of the characters and Melville's direction, as if Melville's prowling camera is what makes things happen, what makes the heist take place. The heists themselves taking place in utter silence, save for some repetitive, mechanical noise. An alarm going off in the background, the rumbling of the train, the sound of a helicopter; sounds left to repeat monotonously until they're not heard at all, until they're not there even as they are.What makes Un Flic flow so effortlessly however is the way Melville handles exposition, the way he handles tension and release. There's an excellent scene where Alain Delon as a cop visits Catherine Deneuve, the girl of the club owner who robbed the bank, and with whom he's having an affair. We know they do from the meaningful glances they exchange in a previous scene while Delon plays the piano. He says she's under arrest; she fondles his jacket and grabs his gun pointing it at him, saying dead men can't arrest anyone. It all turns out to be erotic foreplay. Melville generally doesn't reveal any more than he has to. The characters don't blab exposition just to say something.While not heavy on characterization, and not heavy on plot either, Un Flic soars with tension and an existential quality similar to previous works of Melville, only better. Alain Delon's character is only roughly sketched but he carries with him residues of the other characters he played for the director so that we feel we already know him. One of the absolute best crime films of the seventies.
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