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Emmanuelle Riva's sensual glance at the office boss (Nicole Mirel) who looks "like a young man" is from Les Enfants Terribles, the austere apartment where she parries with the titular curé (Jean-Paul Belmondo) anticipates the inspector's headquarters in Le Doulos. A return to early roots as well as a look ahead for Jean-Pierre Melville, who molds the material as a modulation of Le Silence de la Mer, with Howard Vernon back for a solitary shot. The heroine is a young widow and anti-clerical communist, to whom the Occupation is a matter of "boys in silly hats" until the Gestapo marches into town and children must be baptized to hide Jewish origins. As a gag she visits church, picks a confessional and declares religion "the people's opium"; Belmondo is "a kind of comrade priest," however, and invites Riva to his home, where an attempt at mutual conversion (she into Christianity, he out of celibacy) kicks off. The spiky track-and-cut when Riva slaps Irène Tunc is just one of countless moments where the plot's synergy of body and spirit comes to rest on the rapport between virtuosity of form and sobriety of theme. Melville's swiftness boils Béatrix Beck's novel to its essence, characters -- the elderly Jew (Marco Behar) who takes off incognito and with "the thrill of adventure" in his eye, Monique Bertho's wartime Magdalene, Patricia Gozzi and her friendship with a soldier -- are all sketched delicately. Liberation comes, spiritual struggle continues: Illumination (or is it desire?) strikes her abruptly in the attic, doubt, provocation and morality pass before the camera, often within seconds of each other as Riva notices the buttons on Belmondo's snug cassock. Religion to Melville is purified cinematic expression and gesture, he reaches grace along with his doubting heroine and takes it to underworld killers, stoolies, thieves, samurai. With Gisèle Grimm, Monique Hennessy, and Marielle Gozzi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |