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What Have You Seen In MARCH? (Page 2)
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Topic: What Have You Seen In MARCH?
Lou Goldberg
Standard Userer
Yup, another Sunday Melville film. This time his last, Un Flic, with Richard Crenna, Alain Delon, and Catherine Deneuve. It is the weakest of all the Melville films. This could be due to a number of reasons. Melville was probably in poor health since he died in his mid-50s shortly after. Also, for Melville, this was an experiment that was either going to work or not. It may actually be the film Melville conceived it to be, but it's just not a film that involves its audience. There were problems with all the Melville films: plot holes and improbable moments occur throughout. But there was always substance and momentum. In Un Flic, Melville jetisons plot altogether, forget character: everyone is a blank, just their role and nothing else, and the entire film is merely a collection of set pieces, all the elements of the Melville film but played out at a very mininal surface level. It's such an emotionally cold running of the Melville machinery that you'd think Melville had become Kubrick. All the highly-detailed, intricate, elaborate actions depicted in real time, here become just endless. You just want to shout, as people did during Antonioni films, Rob the Bank already, Rob the Train already. And it's not a good sign when you want Melville to hurry through a scene since the great thing about him is that you become hypotized by the drawn out time it takes for events to unfold. Here, Melville drops that ball and instead of some Oriental miracle you get a muddled mess.
posted 03-30-2003 09:23 PM PT (US) Old Infopop Software by UBB