ARMY OF SHADOWS: THE FILMS OF JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE and PANIQUE: FRENCH CRIME CLASSICS at TIFF Cinematheque (350 King West) from tonight (Thursday, June 29) to September 3. tiff.net/melville and tiff.net/panique. Rating: NNNNN
There are a few things we can count on in a Toronto summer: someone will invent an expensive new ice cream, people will say the Jays have already blown the season and TIFF Cinematheque will pull a whole bunch of European movies out of the vault.
For 2017, though, the focus is exclusively on France. Last week saw the start of an excellent Olivier Assayas series (speaking of which, don’t miss our interview with the director), and today begins Army Of Shadows: The Films Of Jean-Pierre Melville, which marks the centenary of Melville’s birth with a retrospective of his work aimed to remind us that he was one of his country’s greatest storytellers – which is really saying something, given that his contemporaries included Godard, Truffaut and Resnais.
It’s not hyperbole, either. Over the course of a dozen films, Melville laid out the blueprint for a deeper, more resonant form of pulp cinema – extrapolated from the American B-movies he devoured as a young man – that would influence the likes of John Woo and Quentin Tarantino.
Melville’s cinema is fixated on honour and integrity his characters frequently adopt simple moral codes as a way of coping with a world grown indifferent or cruel. That’s a notion that never gets old, and the style with which he told his stories gives them a timeless, existential bent.
The blankness behind Alain Delon’s eyes in Le Samouraï (which opens the series tonight, Thursday, June 29, at 6:30 pm and repeats August 19 at 4 pm) speaks to the cost of a life spent as a contract killer – and to the greater emptiness that could lead a man to that career.
And the Second World War may be over, but the questions of subterfuge and responsibility raised in Melville’s searing resistance thriller Army Of Shadows (Friday June 30, 6:15 pm Sunday July 2, 2:30 pm) will never become irrelevant.
If you’re looking for oddities, there’s Two Men In Manhattan (July 9, 6 pm), in which Melville plays an Agence-Presse newsman scouring the city with a tabloid photographer (Pierre Grasset) for a missing diplomat. With exteriors shot on the fly in New York and interiors shot on a Paris soundstage, and a story that’s less interested in the manhunt than it is in the journalists’ ethical compasses, it’s one of Melville’s least substantial works … but it’s a fascinating diversion.
For something that lands harder, consider Le Silence De La Mer (July 15, 4:15 pm), a WWII two-hander starring Howard Vernon as a German officer billeted in a French village and Nicole Stéphane as the young woman who refuses to communicate with him, or Léon Morin, Priest (July 16, 3:30 pm), another pas de deux starring Emmanuelle Riva as a staunch Communist who finds herself drawn to Jean-Paul Belmondo’s eponymous Catholic priest, who is thus doubly inaccessible.
And then there’s Bob Le Flambeur (July 7, 9 pm), his 1955 caper picture with Roger Duchesne as an aging gambler who masterminds an elaborate casino robbery just to pass the time. A delightful combination of ennui and antic pleasure, it’s now seen as one of the first salvos of the French New Wave – and it works nicely to set up TIFF’s other French cinema series, Panique: French Crime Classics.
Running from July 7 through the beginning of September, it’s a garden of delights. Sure, James Quandt (who also programmed the Melville retrospective) has rounded up the usual suspects – Rififi (July 7, 6:15 pm), Diabolique (July 9, 3:30 pm), Shoot The Piano Player (August 25, 6:30 pm), The Wages Of Fear (September 3, 3:15 pm) – but he’s also shown a little initiative, booking lesser-known titles like Jacques Becker’s Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (July 15, 2 pm), Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face (August 5, 6:15 pm) and a new restoration of Julien Duvivier’s Panique (July 20, 6:30 pm), a 1946 thriller about a placid neighbourhood sent reeling by a brutal murder.
If you see just one movie in this series, though, I’m gonna suggest you catch Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (August 4, 9 pm). A cult thriller about opera singers, motorcyclists and stolen recordings, it remains one of Beineix’s finest – which means it’s one of the most delirious and dazzling experiences you can have on a big screen. It doesn’t play very often, and TIFF’s got a 35mm print lined up. Don’t miss it.
And really, though, if you’re planning to see just one movie in this series … well, what’s wrong with you? See more movies! That’s what they’re for!
