Un Flic

Jean-Pierre Melville's last film; he died a year later, in 1973, at fifty-seven. It pushes the idea he worked on all his career to its limit: the two sides of the law are indistinguishable. Delon plays a burnt-out police commissaire and Richard Crenna a nightclub owner preparing a major heist. Both love the same woman, played by Catherine Deneuve. Paris appears in winter with the colour drained out, and everyone in the film is so buried in the job that neither pleasure nor morality survives. Its most criticised passage is also its most ambitious. A robbery carried out from a helicopter onto a moving train was filmed with models and looks fake. Some treat this as a failure; others point out that Melville had stopped caring about realism, and that the film is an abstract design from beginning to end. Who it is for: viewers who like Melville's cold, near-wordless, ritualised crime films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting realistic action. The model sequence runs long and the pace is deliberately low.