Un Flic

UN FLIC   ***1/2

Jean-Pierre Melville

1972

IDEA:  A cat-and-mouse game ensues between a stolid cop and a cadre of thieves.

BLURB:  In Jean-Pierre Melville’s final, sepulchral film, a cop is hardly different from the criminals he chases. Occupying a perpetually drizzly, color-drained Paris, they’re all frozen in the same milieu of prescribed processes and aggressive rituals. Planning and executing heists and tracking down suspects have been ground down to the same baseline of mechanical motions, emptied of either transgressive triumph or justice, subsisting purely on the fumes of archetypal antecedents. Characterized by Melville’s signature laconic nonchalance but most notable for its pronounced, distancing artifice, Un Flic plays as a genre deconstruction that distills the essences of the crime film into something almost perversely strange. Elements that initially seem slapdash or stilted – weird jumpy cuts, a protracted action set-piece with toy models, brazenly ersatz backdrops – read less as crude liabilities than as apt gestures for evoking an uncanny, simulacral filmic world, its parts fully exposed. As outlandish as much of this can seem, Melville is not out for parody. His gaze is sharp, earnest, and existential as always, trained indulgently but sternly on the alienating roles of masculinity. Delon drives on, but his spirit languishes in monochrome.