Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

Jean-Pierre Melville released Le Cercle Rouge in 1970, and it has spent the half century since declining to join any conversation we are currently having. Three men converge on Paris: a freshly paroled thief, an escaped murderer, and an alcoholic ex-policeman who can shoot. Melville opens with an epigraph attributed to the Buddha, which he invented outright, because atmosphere was the only authority he recognized. The film concerns procedure, silence, and the inevitability of the red circle. It concerns nothing else.

The cast is uniformly white and the film's interests are uniformly masculine. Women appear in three capacities: a girlfriend left behind, a flower girl, a cigarette girl. None of them speaks at any length. Nobody on screen remarks on this arrangement, and Melville plainly found it unremarkable. The heist runs nearly thirty minutes with almost no dialogue, a stretch of filmmaking so committed to withholding that a viewer may check whether the sound has failed. Yves Montand's Jansen drinks because he is a drunk, not because the screenplay wishes to teach us something about affliction.

We are left with a clean sheet. No casting decision announces a correction. No subplot arrives to amend the record or explain how society ought to be arranged. The police commissioner is weary, the criminals are professionals, and the ending is a field of dead men and recovered jewels. This is a museum piece from an era when a crime film was permitted to be merely excellent. The classification is simple, and the tasting note is dry, austere, and free of any sermon.