Two ‘Freedom’ films at the Little

The
cool kids all dig John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, and Wong Kar-Wai,
and those filmmakers all love Jean-Pierre Melville. Thusly, the laws of
syllogism dictate that the cool kids will also adore Melville, whose Bob le Flambeur was just remade into The Good Thief. They’ll get a chance to
fall in love with the re-release of his 1970 flick Le Cercle Rouge this week
at the Little Theatre (beginning Friday, June 6), and they’ll have even more to
admire than the generation before them, because an additional 40 minutes have
been added to the version originally seen in the US.

            Geeks like me who meticulously
studied the Criterion Collection LaserDisk of The Killer already know that Woo (whose moniker appears in the
re-release’s official title as a “presenter”) worships Melville’s
films, particularly 1967’s Le Samouraï.
Its protagonist, played by Alain Delon, serves as the hip template for the
double-fisted gunslingers of Woo’s own flicks. While Rouge isn’t quite as dazzling as Le Samouraï, it’s still an amazing and important heist film,
especially coming so soon on the heels of duds like The Italian Job and Confidence.
Plus, those films don’t have the omnipresent cigarettes, the tightly belted
trench coats, the tiny handguns, the stiff-brimmed hats, or the cool air of
both immortality and nonchalance.

            Rouge is about a diamond theft committed by three men who are each being chased by
their pasts. We first see the handcuffed Vogel (Gian-Maria Volonte) being led
onto a Marseilles-to-Paris train by the feline-obsessed Commissaire Mattei
(André Bourvil). He eventually picks the lock on his cuffs, kicks out the
window in their sleeper car, and jumps from the moving train. Mattei follows
him into the woods, quickly loses him, but never gives up the chase, as he
fears the incident will cripple his reputation.

            Meanwhile, Corey (Delon, looking
quite similar to DeNiro in The Godfather:
Part II) is a day away from being sprung from prison when he’s approached
by a guard who tips him off to a potential beauty of a heist. We learn, after
his release, that Corey took the fall for a mob boss named Rico (André Ekyan),
who he immediately visits and rips off in a brilliant late-night scene. While
he’s on the run from Rico’s cronies, fate brings Corey and Vogel together, and
what follows is one of the finest moments of Rouge, perfectly capturing the code of, and honor among, thieves.

            The two men recruit an
ex-police-sharpshooter-turned-drunk named Jansen (Yves Montand) to help them
disable their target’s alarm with a carefully placed bullet (he’s on the run
from the bottle). Their Place Vendôme jewel snatch, which goes on, sans
dialogue, for around 30 minutes (a la Jules Dassin’s noir heist masterpiece Rififi) features enough tight
choreography to make the “daring rescue” of PFC Jessica Lynch look
spontaneous. In fact, Rouge is
practically a silent movie, so if you’re the type who needs explosions and dumb
one-liners to keep you interested, well, 2
Fast 2 Furious opens this weekend, too.

Patrice
Leconte’s The Man On the Train (opening Friday, June 6, at the Little)
sounds like a cliché-riddled mess. Two polar opposites meet and envy one
other’s lifestyles — it’s been done before. If Train were an American film, one of the characters would probably
stumble upon and invoke some ancient incantation that would, after appearing to
do nothing, eventually occasion some sort of spirit-swap. And in that American
film, the two characters would probably be played by Oscar-winners Tommy Lee
Jones and Cuba Gooding, Jr.

            Luckily, Train, like Leconte, hails from France. Instead of Gooding, we get
the plastic surgery-loving rocker Johnny Hallyday as Milan, a character we meet
as he takes a train to a tiny provincial town. Milan, who is the titular man on
the titular train, is to meet three other men in this town, where they have
planned to knock over a bank. When he arrives at his destination, Milan
discovers the town’s only hotel is closed for the season, which ratchets up his
tension headache another couple of degrees.

            While at the pharmacy in search of
something to ease the pain, Milan runs into Manesquier (Lost In La Mancha‘s Jean Rochefort, stepping in for T.L. Jones), a
retired poetry teacher who has lived alone since his mother died some years
back. Yes, Manesquier’s home is quite large; and no, he wouldn’t mind at all if
Milan crashed there for a couple of days. The two men retreat to Manesquier’s
mansion.

            So here we have the scruffy,
leather-jacketed Milan, looking every bit like a lifetime criminal, and the
doddering Manesquier, with slippers and a pipe. One is a risk-taker who wishes
he could just sit around a big, empty house and chill out for a while. The
other sits around a big, empty house and chills out, but really craves more
excitement. This cinematic Yin-Yang relationship is completed when both
characters go through potentially life-changing experiences — the bank job
for Milan, triple-bypass surgery for Manesquier.

            Leconte manages to stretch this very
simple story into a very watchable film. In the process, he adds one more notch
to an eclectic filmography that makes him somewhat of a French John Sayles.

            The story was penned by 70-year-old
novelist Claude Klotz. Klotz has written original screenplays for Leconte
before, but he probably didn’t come up with the nifty idea of each character
having their own scores (Milan’s is cool guitar, Manesquier’s is classical
piano stuff), which slowly blend into one another.

Interested
in raw, unsanitized movie ramblings from Jon? Visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy (www.sick-boy.com), or listen to him on WBER’s Friday
Morning Show.

This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2003.