Le Deuxième Souffle: Melville's Prison-Break Fatalism

Melville opens Le Deuxième Souffle with men going over a prison wall in near silence, and he takes his time about it. There is no dialogue worth the name, no explanatory scene, no introduction to the man we are following. Three figures move through the dark, one falls, two run, and the film has told you its entire theology before anyone has spoken: this is a world of physical procedure carried out by men who do not explain themselves, and it will kill some of them at random.

The man who gets over is Gustave Minda, called Gu, played by Lino Ventura with the heavy, wounded solidity that made him the most convincing criminal in French cinema. He is not a charmer. Ventura had been a professional wrestler before he was an actor and he moves like it: economical, weighted, giving nothing away above the collar. Gu has escaped with ten years still to serve, and the film is about what a man like that does with a freedom that has no future in it.

The plot is a pretext for a code

The mechanics are straightforward enough. Gu needs money and a route out of France. His sister Manouche (Christine Fabréga) and her bodyguard Alban (Michel Constantin) shelter him in Paris while the police look. A job comes up in Marseille: an armoured truck carrying platinum, to be taken on a mountain road. Gu takes it because it pays, and because a man with ten years hanging over him has a specific relationship to risk.

Against him is Commissaire Blot (Paul Meurisse), and Blot is the best thing in the film. He is witty, urbane, faintly bored, and he does his police work as a form of conversation. Meurisse plays him as a man who finds the underworld’s code sincerely interesting and is entirely willing to violate anything within it to get a result. Melville, who admired professionals of every stripe, gives the policeman exactly the same respect he gives the thieves, and the film’s most enjoyable scenes are Blot walking into a room and describing to the criminals in it precisely what they have been doing, for the pleasure of watching their faces.

The source is a novel by José Giovanni, and that matters more than it usually would. Giovanni had been a criminal, sentenced to death, reprieved and imprisoned before he became a writer, and his fiction carries a first-hand understanding of the underworld’s obsessions. The one he keeps returning to is reputation — the idea that a man who has lost everything else still owns his name, and that the name is the only thing an informer can steal from him.

Blot’s trap

The film’s central mechanism is a piece of police work so cruel it functions as the plot’s whole moral engine, and it can be described without spoiling the outcome because Melville shows you the trap being set. Blot needs to know about the platinum job. He cannot make Gu talk. So he arranges circumstances under which Gu appears to have talked, and lets the appearance loose in the underworld.

That is the second wind of the title, inverted. Gu’s escape gave him a second life; Blot’s manoeuvre makes that life worthless, because a man labelled doulos in this world has nothing left to be. Everything Gu does in the final movement of the film is aimed at correcting the record — a purely symbolic objective, of no practical benefit to him whatsoever, pursued at total cost. Ventura plays the obsession without a single speech about honour. It is all in the walk.

This is Melville’s most sustained argument about the thing that fascinated him. His crime films are always, at one remove, about the Occupation, and about men who had to decide under pressure whether they would talk. He made Army of Shadows three years later and put the same question in its actual historical clothing, with the same conclusion: the code is arbitrary, unprovable, and the only thing standing between a man and nothing.

The craft: the ambush, and the silence

The platinum robbery on the mountain road is the film’s set piece and one of Melville’s great sequences. It runs long, almost wordless, in the flat early light, and it is constructed entirely out of positions, timings and small physical tasks. Melville’s camera stays wide and patient. There is no cutting for excitement, no score goosing the tension, no close-up on a sweating face to tell you how to feel. Men arrive, take up positions, wait, and do a job.

The technique is a genuine argument about what a heist is. Melville had already decided by 1966 that a robbery filmed as a thrill is a lie about robbery, and that the truth of it is closer to a military operation or a factory shift: rehearsed, boring in prospect, terrifying only in the seconds when something deviates. The famous half-hour silence of Rififi is the direct precedent, and Melville learned it thoroughly; he would perfect it four years later in Le Cercle Rouge.

At around 150 minutes this is Melville’s longest film and the length is the most common complaint against it. The middle stretch in Paris moves at the pace of a man waiting for a phone call, which is deliberate and is also, honestly, a lot to ask. Marcel Combes’s black-and-white photography is superb and unhurried. The film has no interest in your evening.

It is worth knowing how completely Giovanni meant it. He had been condemned to death for his part in a criminal gang in the aftermath of the Occupation, sat under that sentence, and was reprieved and imprisoned instead; the writing came out of that. Le Trou, Classe tous risques and this novel all came out of that, and what they share is a total absence of romance about the underworld combined with an absolutely unironic belief in its code. Giovanni is not describing honour among thieves as an attractive fiction. He is describing it as the only law available to men outside the law, and he watched it kill people.

Alain Corneau remade the film in 2007 with Daniel Auteuil and Monica Bellucci. It is competent, handsome and completely inert, and the comparison is instructive: the plot survives the transfer intact and the fatalism does not, because the fatalism was never in the plot. It was in Melville’s refusal to hurry.

The real ancestor

Directly: Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi, the 1954 film that invented the register Melville is working in — the ageing professional, the loyalty to a friend, the criminal life filmed as a tired occupation rather than an adventure. Becker got there first and Melville never pretended otherwise.

The closer relative is Claude Sautet’s Classe tous risques, from 1960: also from a José Giovanni novel, also starring Lino Ventura, also about a criminal discovering that the underworld’s promises of loyalty evaporate the moment they cost anybody anything. Watch the two together and you get the same author’s obsession handled by two very different temperaments — Sautet finds the exhaustion and the domestic weight, Melville finds the ritual. And Le Doulos, four years earlier, is the same question posed as a puzzle rather than a tragedy: who is the informer, and what does the answer cost.

A verdict, argued

Le Deuxième Souffle is the least fashionable of Melville’s major crime films, and the reasons are all defensible. It is long. Its plot is more complicated than its ideas require. It lacks the immaculate minimalism of Le Samouraï and the clockwork satisfaction of Le Cercle rouge, and it asks you to care intensely about a point of underworld etiquette that a modern viewer may find frankly ridiculous.

The case for it is Ventura and Meurisse, and the fact that this is the film where Melville’s fatalism has the most human weight in it. Le Samouraï is a beautiful abstraction; Alain Delon’s hitman is barely a person. Gu is a person — heavy, tired, fifty, capable of affection, with a sister he loves and a body that is starting to argue with him. Whatever the film finally does to him costs something, and the cost is why this remains the Melville I return to most.

Melville himself was reportedly dissatisfied with it and remade its ideas, better and shorter, in the films that followed. He was probably right about the craft and wrong about the value. There is a strong restoration in circulation and it deserves the two and a half hours. Give it the evening it demands.

Spoilers below

Stop here if you have not seen it. The ending is the argument and the argument depends on the ending.

Blot’s trap works exactly as designed. After the platinum robbery, Gu is taken, and the police stage an interrogation — including physical coercion — in circumstances that allow them to manufacture the impression that he named his accomplices. The details are published. Gu, who withstood the interrogation, walks out of custody as a man the underworld believes has talked, and it is the one injury he cannot absorb.

What follows is the film’s whole thesis. Gu could run. He has the money, he has the contacts, he could take the second wind and disappear. Instead he spends it, deliberately and completely, on producing a document that clears his name — extracting from the men involved a written acknowledgement that he did not inform. It is a piece of paper. It has no legal standing, no protective value, and it cannot buy him a day of liberty. He gives his life for a signature, because in the world Giovanni wrote and Melville filmed, the signature is the only property a man cannot be robbed of and the only one he can throw away.

The final shootout is staged with Melville’s usual flat, unglamorous economy, and Gu dies as the mechanism requires. Blot’s last scene is the film’s quiet horror: the policeman has won, entirely, by using the code against a man who believed in it — and Meurisse plays the victory with the faintest trace of something that might be respect, or might just be professional satisfaction at a tool that worked.