Le Doulos screened at Alliance Francaise

‘LE DOULOS’, renowned French film director Jean- Pierre Melville's brilliant but moody tough-guy drama, was screened at the Alliance Francaise de Lahore on Wednesday.

The title ‘Le Doulos’ means “hat”, slang for informer, stool pigeon, rat or grass, and it’s a moody, ruminative lowlife crime drama winding up with as many corpses on the floor as Hamlet, and pungent with the sweaty maleness of Melville’s tough-guy pictures. It’s also a world of grisly unreflective misogyny, in which women can be slapped around and beaten up.

The movie features Melville’s classic images: the nightclub scenes, impassive criminals in cars wearing the uniform of snap-brim hats, trench coats, cigarettes dangling from the mouth – so uniform, in fact, that they look alike, and Le Doulos is the one Melville film that finally puts a self-aware, black-comic narrative twist on this generic mannerism. In the movie, French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Silien, a safe-cracker who labours under the reputation of a “doulos” because of his friendship with a cop.

His buddy Maurice (played by the Italian actor and singing star Serge Reggiani) is just out of prison and, having already whacked the fence he knows killed his girlfriend while he was inside, is now on the run again because his latest robbery was interrupted by Silien’s inspector friend, whom Maurice shoots dead before escaping. Silien is suspected of fitting him up, so he realises that to redeem his criminal honour, he must get the law off Maurice’s back by framing an alternative suspect for the cop killing: creepy club-owner Nutthecchio (Michel Piccoli). Near the end of “Le Doulos” (1962), Jean-Paul Belmondo reinterprets everything that has gone before, his words illustrated by flashbacks to the film we have seen.

That is essentially a wink by writer-director Jean- Pierre Melville, suggesting that he was misleading us all along.

The film opens with a newly released prisoner (Serge Reggiani) calling on a man who set up a diamond heist for him. He later has good reason to believe the Belmondo character fingered him, in a plot that leads through nightclubs, whiskey bars (no wine for Melville), dark underpasses and deserted suburban wastelands. There are three lovely lady friends, including Therese (Monique Hennessy), who is attached to Nuttheccio (Michel Piccoli), a shady nightclub owner.

Belmondo ties her up and gags her, which is perhaps what she deserves, depending on what we choose to believe. (The movie drew some criticism for its treatment of women, leading Melville to defend himself: He did not mistreat the women, his characters did.)