Saturday, April 25, 2009

Bob le flambeur (1956)



Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville.
Starring Isabelle Corey and Daniel Cauchy.
In a Nutshell: A gambler schemes to rob a casino and runs afoul of his two protégés.

Free of any moralizing climax, Bob le flambeur is a decadent love letter to the skuzzy pits of the streets that hold movie criminals so dear to our hearts. Robert “Bob” Montagné (Roger Duchesne) is a gambler, but one so endearingly lousy that he is friends with nearly many well connected underworld contacts (and even a few authority figures). Duchesne is not wooden or blank in his acting, but Melville has given him very few close ups, reaction shots, and scenes alone. So to the viewer, we only know of Bob through the other character’s dialogue. And they paint a fascinating portrait of a man, hopeless but bound by duty and an unspoken honor towards the street life, while Duchesne’s poker face gives us no further clues (and gives the movie an unspoken cool guy edge).


Before the heist is planned, the movie indulges itself in detailing Bob’s lifestyle and displays a France at the twilight of its romanticism. A young protégé (Daniel Cauchy) nips at his heels and ends up falling for Bob’s new crew member, a corruptible street walker played breathlessly by then-non-actress Isabelle Corey. However, like Bob, her appeal is less character building, more a few well staged looks and other character’s dialogue.


After losing far too much money, Bob stages a robbery that ends up on the lips of every man and woman in town. Disaster is inevitable, but it is charming how Bob escapes the crush of failure by simply playing it as he always does; all-knowing and good humored as though he anticipated it to all go awry. After all, Bob and his most loyal of accomplices live in a self-inflated (and easily shattered) world of delusions of criminal greatness. At the end, it is hard to say if Bob has truly risen above his fantasy world or just lived straight through it. Bob le flambeur is fantastic movie about the criminal world and the incorrigibility of man too wrapped up in his own self-delusions to act with caution. But it’s that recklessness that gives Bob that edge. Great character and great movie.

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