Leon Morin, Priest / Le Doulos

Studio: Kino Lorber Studio Classics

Aug 02, 2019 By Stephen Danay Web Exclusive

The modern perception of writer/director Jean-Pierre Melville’s brief but influential filmography - he only directed 13 features over 23 years, a small body of work compared to many of his French and American contemporaries - is dominated by his chilly, minimalist gangster films. His best known films - Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge - set a template of professional, terse hitmen prone to philosophizing voice over that has been imitated by everyone from Quentin Tarantino to John Woo to Michael Mann. A less well-known, but equally crucial preoccupation of Melville’s was the German occupation of France during World War II. Born an Alsatian Jew - real surname: Grumbach - Melville worked alongside the resistance during the war and spent his entire cinematic career examining the toll the occupation took on the French people, beginning with his 1949 debut feature Le Silence de la Mer and continuing all the way through his late-career masterpiece Army of Shadows. In the early 1960s, Melville made two films addressing his twin obsessions, both featuring Breathless star Jean Paul Belmondo; 1961’s wartime drama Leon Morin, Priest and 1963’s twisty gangster thriller, Le Doulos.

Despite Belmondo playing the titular character, Leon Morin, Priest is one of the few Melville films to feature a female protagonist, a spirited young woman played by Emmanuelle Riva. Of course, it’s still a Melville film and Riva’s Barny is prone to existential voice over despite being a secretary rather than a hitman or a gambler. A widow raising a young daughter in a small town in the French Alps, the thoughtful and open-minded Barny is positioned as being emotionally and mentally out of step with her surroundings. But rather than wanting more than this provincial life the way certain other French country girls do, Barny finds shelter in a bemused cynicism about the world around her. She can’t even work up much anger at the German occupation, despite the fact that it requires sending her half-Jewish daughter - named France, in an amusingly unsubtle metaphor - to live with friends on the outskirts of town. Barny whiles away her days in a mundane office job, idly lusting after her female co-worker and poking fun at her peers. One day, Barny’s gentle trolling finds her in a Catholic confessional, teasing the priest about her own lack of faith. She discovers a kindred spirit in Father Leon Morin, an ardent communist and deep thinker who sees her atheism as fodder for debate rather than a sin.

It’s a testament to Melville’s intelligence as a filmmaker and the bottomless charms of Riva and Belmondo that this entire set-up isn’t the middle-brow bore it appears to be on paper. It’s hard to overstate what a dour, self-serious performance Riva could have given, considering that her character is “existential widow living under Nazi occupation”. She’s playful and breezy throughout, but never sacrifices the intelligence or dignity of the character. Similarly, Morin could very easily be a condescending mansplainer who sets the fickle woman straight. Instead, Belmondo infuses Morin with the laid-back hipster vibe of his gangster roles, combining it with genuine integrity and respect for Barny’s opinions. Their first scene together makes their future intimacy plain; Melville’s camera placement causes the screen between them to all but disappear, demystifying the confessional and showing us two people in conversation.

For all their eventual closeness - and Belmondo and Riva’s combined attractiveness - Melville skirts the obvious path of forbidden romance, presenting Morin not as a love interest, but as a physical manifestation of Barny’s growing connection to humanity at large. Barny is initially presented as getting along with everyone - a priest, her anti-Semitic co-worker, her Vichy neighbor - but is eventually pressured by both Leon and her circumstances to take a side. The film never lets her - or the audience - of the hook with black-and-white morality. Barny feels genuine remorse when the good-natured young woman she takes bike rides with is executed by the resistance as a collaborator. Even the American liberation brings no relief, accompanied by blaring jazz and drunken soldiers who try to sexually assault her. Her desire to remain above the conflict raging around her is understandable, but untenable; a lesson that feels as relevant today as it did then.

Melville treats morality with equal seriousness in his genre work; Leon Morin, Priest was followed by Le Doulos, the story of a Parisian jewel thief fresh out of prison who signs on for a heist with a friend who may or may not be a police informant. As Maurice, actor Serge Reggiani is another in a long line of Melville protagonists that eschew square-jawed toughness for hang-dog resignation. The dashing good looks are reserved for the potential villain of the piece. Rocking a more mature version of the “Tom Hardy cosplaying Humphrey Bogart” look he codified in Breathless, Belmondo’s Silien is a shark in a trench coat, his uncertain loyalties and unflappable calm clear antecedents of Gabriel Byrne’s Tom Hagen in Miller’s Crossing.

Although the investigative police segments feel like a dry run for Le Samourai, Melville’s unique strain of ice-cold romanticism is on full display in Le Doulos, which roughly translates as “fingermen”, or more colloquially, “snitches”. “Is there truly honor among thieves?”, may be one of the most cliched questions in cinema, but Melville’s direction is striking enough and his writing hardboiled enough to make it feel fresh. “You don’t like him?”, one character asks another. “It’s nothing personal. He’s just scum.” Melville’s gangster’s are almost abstractly dispassionate, but that makes them no less susceptible to the lure of petty vengeance, misplaced loyalties or one last score. American gangster films are always about the rise and the fall, guys who start small and get big, if only for a little while. French gangsters films never feature bosses or flashy big-shots, just sad chain-smoking bastards in trench coats. French gangsters start small and get smaller. As one knowingly puts it in Le Doulos, “In this job you end up poor or riddled with bullets.” If there’s a starker example of the difference between post-war America and post-war France, I haven’t heard it.

(www.kinolorber.com/film/leon-morin-priest-special-edition-aka-leon-morin-pretre)

(www.kinolorber.com/film/le-doulos-special-edition-aka-the-finger-man)