Le Deuxieme Soufle

Hi Aki,

Le Deuxieme Soufle (second breath, second wind) opens with two title cards. The first says basically, ‘We don’t endorse the things these gangsters do, we only make a movie based on a fiction book.’ The censors of de Gaulle must have given them a hard time. The second expresses some of melville’s philosophy: ‘the only right a man has is to choose when he will die. If he chooses to die out of weariness, then his life will have had absolutely no meaning.’

Tough guy Gu (Lino Ventura) breaks out of prison after serving 10 years. He finds his girlfriend and several buddies still loyal, still willing to help him get out of the country. But he needs money first, and gets involved in a armored car robbery of 500 kilos of platinum. They pull off the heist, as usual in heist movies, but then, also as usual, things start to go bad. Gu still has to hang around to get his piece of the platinum, then arrange a sale. But he gets caught by other gangsters who claim that Gu’s group cheated, the heist was the ‘Angel’s’ job, and they stole it from him. Gu says, ‘Paul wouldn’t do that, if he did he’s crazy, but I always follow the rules, the Angel knows that!’ – but he has been tricked: the thugs are really cops, under command of the wily Inspector Blot, and they now have Gu’s voice on tape implicating Paul.

The tape isn’t legal evidence, so the cops bring in Paul and they torture him (interestingly, they waterboard him!) and beat up Gu, trying to get them to confess and name the other two guys in on the heist. But paul won’t talk, and neither will Gu.

The cops also release to the papers that Gu has talked, named paul, and that ‘other arrests will follow.’ So the other two guys think Gu has broken the code of honor, and that he will name them too. His name is put on a hit list.

Gu breaks out of jail hospital and makes a miracle recovery from his torture. He kidnaps one of the cops and forces him to write and sign a confession that he tricked Gu, that Gu never confessed, and that the cop tortured Gu and paul. Then he murders the cop.

Gu takes the confession to show the other two guys. But paul’s brother, who’s a bit of a rat, is now pushing them to kill Gu. They don’t believe Gu, and he’s forced to kill them all – but he gets shot in the battle, and can’t walk. he’s trapped in a crummy apartment while the cops come – led by Inspector Blot. In a shootout, Gu dies in Blot’s arms, and his last breath is the name of his girlfriend.

Outside, the girlfriend asks blot if Gu had any last words. Blot says, ‘not one.’ She’s disappointed of course. He tells her to go home and forget all about it. Then he ‘accidentally’ drops the notebook with the other cop’s confession next to the reporter, and says, ‘you dropped something, I’m sure it’s yours.’ So the last two acts of blot seem to be to honor Gu’s memory, and to try to let the girlfriend move on with her life.

The stunt work is poor by Hollywood standards. Black and white photography in this print is not great, grays and washed out. But the no-nonsense gangster code is great; ventura and paul meurisse (as blot) are terrific.

This movie is good to see next to Army of Shadows – as the woman commenting on Shadows said, melville’s resistance fighters act like gangsters, and his gangsters act like resistance fighters.

I see no hint of misogyny in the way melville treats the girlfriend here. she’s never ugly, she’s always loyal, and follows the code in her own way. She is however in need of male protection, as she has a big guy as bodyguard, and inspector blot remarks that without him she would never have lasted. Again, melville shows us a man’s world, in which women are almost irrelevant. Men can love women, and they can play a part in the world, but women can’t be equal in this world.

Blot is an interesting character, the sort of cop who knows all about the underworld and its code. You get the sense that he could have been a gangster himself if he wanted to; but the other cops (mostly the guy who tortures Gu and paul) are clearly stupid, and would never last long as gangsters – they’d be third-rate thugs at best.

Blot at one point tells how Gu used the same gun to kill the armored car guards as he had used last month on other thugs. ‘it’s a gun he knows, and is comfortable with, he will use it on this important job. But he doesn’t care if we know he did it. He is doomed and he knows it.’

Other references indicate that Gu himself is in agreement with this: he knows he has almost no chance to escape the country, and he is determined not to go back to jail. He will die first. So the whole story is how he faces death.

The heist itself is almost irrelevant. The other guys involved, when they hear Gu is going to join them, wonder if he is up to it; ‘in jail I heard about him, he’s washed up, too old, he’s lost his nerve.’ The heist then becomes more a chance for Gu to prove to them and himself and us, that he does still have what it takes – to be a man, ultimately.

Then the aftermath of the heist is just a chance for Gu to live up to the code. Though he was tricked into confessing, and it can’t be used to convict him, he still risks his life to get proof that he didn’t rat out paul or anybody else, and he dies in the effort to prove it. Another man offers to take the confession to the other guys, but Gu is adamant, he will go himself. it’s his mess and he’ll clean it up.

Gu’s share of the platinum remains where he buried it, in the cellar of a house where he’s hiding. Nobody else knows it’s there. The other guys are dead, we don’t know what happens to their share. Paul might still get out, he has a wife giving him an alibi, and she and his lawyers will probably know where the platinum is that’s paul’s share, but it seems most likely that inspector Blot will get the armored car informant to confess, that paul will be guilty on the informant’s confession, and will have to bargain and lose his shre as well (but this is only my guessing at what’s probably going to happen).

Melville and ventura were well suited for this kind of story. Both were middle aged at this point, and ventura could perfectly express the notion of the strong man, not yet washed up, but definitely past his prime, with really nothing to look forward to. He is matched in the movie with a younger crook, and you get the feeling that the younger guy will end up like ventura, like Gu, if he lives that long. But he crosses Gu and he doesn’t live that long. Too bad.

It’s absurd and a little existentialist in this sense. The point is not what you do, but how well you do it, if You’re a true professional or not, if You’re in control.

But also for melville, the gangster stands in for the resistance fighter. The way he looks at gangsters is colored by his experiences as a youth living under foreign occupation and war.

The woman commentator on the disk (she French; paired with a british male commentator) said that for the French at this time, a stretch in prison was a common symbol for France during the occupation, which was interesting.

The novel this book is based on has lots of the backstories of the characters, but melville strips all that out of it. he’s only interested in the present. it’s a very abstract portrait in many ways, which gives it an added mythic quality. it’s clear in the way we see the movie, that it’s like a western, like yojimbo: not real, but symbolic. This lets us enjoy rooting for the gangster, the murderer. But also as you note re: the yakuza, the same code is mentioned here, that ‘civilians’ are not to be harmed if you can help it. He kills the motorcycle armed guards, but he wishes he didn’t have to, that there was some way to get the platinum without any killing. In another sense of course the armed guards are not civilians – they have uniforms, they carry guns, and this is their job, to guard the goods.

A grim tale, told in few words, but great tough guy actors.

(written around 4 February 2009)