In Which We Live Through All Our Actors

This is the second in a series examining the works of the French director Jean-Pierre Melville.

Mr. Black and Mr. Green

by ETHAN PETERSON

Le Doulos begins with Maurice (Serge Reggiani) returning to Paris on foot in the tracking shot to end all tracking shots. The camera almost never leaves Reggiani's dark face in the film's tragic interiors, but when he is outdoors like in the first moments we view his slight, quick form, writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville gives us a sense of how incidental humanity is to the landscape it inhabits.

Maurice has been released from prison, but he has changed a lot since he went inside. His medical condition – an iron deficiency – has become substantially worse. His first act as a free man is a murder. Later, his best friend Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) shows up at his apartment and promises various equipment for a robbery Maurice is planning on the home of a rich old man. After Silien leaves the apartment, we see him telephoning his only other friend in the world, Detective Salignari of the local police.

The deceptively fast-paced Le Doulos then segues into one of the most thrilling half-hours in cinema. While Maurice heads off to commit a robbery we know he really does not need to complete, Silien returns to Maurice's apartment, finding girlfriend Thérèse there alone. He beats the shit out of her and ties her to a radiator, all the while wearing the most placid, sociopathic reaction imaginable. This is the scene we turn over in our mind throughout the rest of Le Doulos. It is one thing to overwhelm a woman with violence, but it is another to do it from a place of moral justification.

Later, Silien explains his behavior. Melville flashes back, revisiting the events of film, in the central twist of Le Doulos. This series of reveals seems to explain everything that has happened in a new and more justified light. But a key shot of Silien looking in the mirror suggests there is another possible Silien, another explanation for who he is and why is slapping this woman so hard. Silien's version of events is that Thérèse was the informer, and that he had seen her having a nice lunch with Detective Salignari.

This montage narrated by Silien has always been assumed to be verifiably true. But there are many holes in his account, and we know that Maurice is a gullible listener. Melville uses no music outside of the film's diegesis, and the light jazz that is actually played by a black piano player in a restaurant suggests that we, too, are being taken for a ride. Thérèse is probably innocent.

Quentin Tarantino cited Le Doulos as the main influence on Reservoir Dogs. Like its American twin, Le Doulos is certainly an extremely talkative motion picture, and half of what is being said in any specific scene is likely to be utter bullshit not meant to be taken at face value on the other end of the conversation. Then, suddenly, Melville gives us an unexpectedly tender scene between Silien and his ex-girlfriend Fabienne (Fabienne Dali). Fabienne is the only actual, legitimate person in the entire film, and yet she is completely flattened by the weight of her associations. Her scene with Silien must have been one of Quentin's favorites.

The similarities to Reservoir Dogs are most obvious in the trenchcoats and the similarity in setting. Melville turns Paris into a weirdly-Americanized version of the same. The film's most famous scene, a conversation between Silien and a detective that runs a full ten minutes without a single cut (the boom operator wore all black so as to emit no light that might cause a reflection), occurs in a replica of a New York police station. In many other moments, Melville focuses on anachronisms and a flexibility of design that seems to prefigure the aesthetics of Blade Runner.

As a result, Le Doulos embodies the strange quality of fantasy to it. Belmonde in particular has never been anything close to my favorite actor, too self-contained and himself to inhabit the life of another. Here his unsuitability for the role of stool pigeon makes the film all the more ludicrous, and the effect of seeing him violently beat up a woman is the oddity Melville was going for. It's funny that Le Doulos was eventually released for all audiences in France, since it would merit a full R rating today.

Getting Reggiani for the part of Maurice was key for Melville in making this project, and you can see why. (Reggiani initially demanded Belmonde's role until Melville convinced him otherwise.) He is one of the few small actors that never looks feebly or unimposing despite his size. His dark, Italian looks make him into an alien of the French cinema – there is absolutely no place for him to hide, and running away is a futile gesture. He will always be caught and returned to the prison that is his home. In this noir masterpiece, as in all his films, Melville excels at seeing through the eyes of all his characters. "Making films means being all the actors at once, living other lives," he said later.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which Dinner Is Always An Important And Special Time

Swing Set

by ETHAN PETERSON

Fun Mom Dinner
dir. Althea Jones
93 minutes

Kate (Toni Collette) and Emily (Katie Aselton) are the best of friends. Both actresses are substantially different looking than their usual cinematic representation in Fun Mom Dinner, the brilliantly morose comedy from first-time screenwriter Julie Rudd.

Here, Collette shows off her considerable glamour. So often made up as a kooky aunt, she has always been expert at obscuring her natural beauty, and it is a shocking thrill when she lets her hair down. At first we are led to believe Kate is the sort of mother who is openly contemptuous of others because she fears her own identity as a woman and mother may not be up to the task. This proves true, but even this simple psychological profile obscures an actual person. Trained screenwriters lazily cast stereotypes onto the page; Rudd has made actual women here.

But why does it matter what these women look like? We are so used to seeing them slip on one costume or another in their previous roles, that Fun Mom Dinner's presentation of Bridget Everett, Molly Shannon, Katie Aselton and Toni Collette as complete persons without any apology necessary includes aethestic considerations. An actor also, after all, must be nice to look at.

Director Althea Jones does marvelous things with light, and she does a capable job of making all these actors look like they are in a real, natural environment. Aselton is particular has mastered a charming sort of darkness, and Jones accentuates this by placing her in hidden positions that reflect her own insecurities. "Want to watch John Oliver?" her husband asks her before bed, in what feels like the worst nightmare imaginable.

As a rival mother who invites Kate and Emily to a lovely dinner, Molly Shannon makes for a realistic divorcee. Rudd writes all her characters with intense sensitivity, but Shannon's single woman is such a nuanced character you almost can't believe she is in a movie, let alone one that for the most part went straight-to-cable. Shannon's character is close with Melanie (Bridget Everett). You can tell that Ms. Everett is still finding her sea legs as an actress after so many years of stand-up, but she has magnificent presence here, surprising us in scene after scene with her devotion to being herself.

Aselton plays off these other, mainly comic actors brilliantly. She had the good fortune of coming into her own as a performer at the same time her physical beauty, always intense, reached another level through the innate character provided by middle age. As I alluded, her husband Tom (Adam Scott) is a very serious piece of shit. Yet there is something about him possibly redeemable, which makes his desperately awful treatment of his wife so much worse.

It is probably smart to couch this serious, imaginative film in the language of a comedy along the lines of the almost unwatchable Rough Night to order to bring more eyes to it, but eventually I concluded the film's title did something of a disservice to what it was offering to us as viewers. Still, there is nothing wrong with the silly and outlandish moments the film offers, and they usually come about in a real and earned way.  

On some level, the concession to motherhood itself. Yes, women who are mothers have this overriding fact as a key aspect of their lives. Fun Mom Dinner does much to explode the idea that there is nothing else for people who value their families. The more I thought about that, it seemed like a worthwhile and somewhat rare message.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which We All Stand For Something Else

Thick Skin

by ETHAN PETERSON

Salvation
creators Liz Kruger, Matt Wheeler and Craig Shapiro
CBS

In one episode of Salvation, Liam Cole (Charlie Rowe) escorts his girlfriend Jillian Hayes (Jacqueline Byers) to her first day of work. As she approaches the entrance, she asks him for a pep talk, since she is very nervous about working for Darius Tanz (Santiago Cabrera). He shows her Darius’ collection of meteorites, and adds that she is completely unique like each of them. Undeterred by the fact her sexual partner compared her to a rock, she responds, “Damn, you’re good.”

Jillian is the author of a science fiction novel called Shadowside, which she self-published. She has been hired to serve on a committee that will select 160 people to colonize Mars. Her first input to the group is that they will need a fair number of poets, artists and musicians. Everyone looks at her like she is batshit, so she runs to her boyfriend to complain.

Liam is evidently working on something very important — a kind of electromagnetic shield that enables interstellar travel — but he has to go to the snack bar at Tanz headquarters to order to console this increasingly fragile woman. “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” he says. “The guy sounds like a total jerk.” This is how people at MIT talk, you see. Working with a government agent named Grace (Jennifer Finnigan), Liam figures out that Tanz plans to abandon the Earth because it will shortly become uninhabitable as a result of an asteroid strike.

Mr. Tanz is quite the man. He is basically like if Mark Zuckerberg absorbed Arnold Schwarzenegger within his body. At one point he is waterboarded for over an hour and he only looks mildly discomfited. He has this weird workstation where he has to lean over and use an extremely loud mouse in order to operate the OS. In the days that follow his waterboarding, he is extremely cranky, even more so than usual, in a manner reminiscent of when Elon Musk enters his menstrual cycle.

On her second day of work, self-published Jillian is forced to endure the indignity of a security check at the entrance to the workplace. She snaps at one of the security guards, letting him know how displeased she is when it comes to the working environment of Tanz industries. I don’t think she will be lasting long in this job, but who cares? Her boyfriend wears a Joy Division shirt for, like, hours.

When Jillian and Liam have sex, which is virtually every evening and every night despite their busy schedule, he still wears a t-shirt. She is nude, but only from the waist up. In the morning he gets this quizzical look on this face, a combination of not quite knowing where he is, and the fear of being gripped from behind by someone you met in a bar. In response or in repose, Jillian constantly smiles with her teeth.

Salvation is an incredibly cheap-looking show, maybe the worst to ever appear on a major network. The entire thing looks like it takes place in one square mile of Canada. I realize that sometimes Canada has to stand in for the U.S., but in the case of Salvation, there is a lot of foliage and streets that just do not reliably represent the United States.

Things are not all bad. Except for the dolt who plays Liam's girlfriend, the rest of the cast is top-notch quality. Jennifer Finnigan looks exactly what you would expect a spectral ghost to resemble, and her romance with the head of a government task force on the asteroid, a fellow named Harris (Ian Anthony Dale), is quite implausible. Amazingly, she also has time to be a single mom. Will wonders never cease?

Conventional wisdom would say that Charlie Rowe really missed out by losing to Tom Holland for the role of Spiderman, but since Spiderman was such total shit, he probably did his career a favor. He is an exciting young actor, unique both in his t-shirt wearing modesty and his staggering assembly of reaction faces to whatever is going on. Watching his cheekbones is like being told a very broad and general bedtime story. 

Despite these exciting, nay, groundbreaking performances, nothing can feasibly alleviate the mental dustbowl required to sit through Salvation. It is not even that things are exactly boring, since the show keeps a brisk pace. It is more that nothing makes any sense whatsoever — like, how many murder subplots are necessary before Earth is obliterated by a large rock?

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.