In the pantheon of cinematic aphorisms, “less is more” remains a mantra too often ignored by even the most revered auteurs. Jean-Pierre Melville, the undisputed grandmaster of French crime cinema, fell prey to this oversight with his 1970 opus Le Cercle rouge (The Red Circle). A film of undeniable craftsmanship, it teeters under the weight of its own ambitions, its 140-minute runtime testing the patience of audiences even as its icy formalism mesmerises. Though lauded as a genre classic, Le Cercle rouge exemplifies the perils of excess, its glacial pacing and narrative indulgence diluting the taut precision that elevated Melville’s earlier works like Le Samouraï (1967) to masterpiece status.
Melville opens the film with a fabricated Buddhist proverb: “Siddhartha Gautama drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and declared: ‘When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, on that day they will inevitably come together in the red circle.’” This pseudo-profundity sets the stage for a tale of fate-bound antiheroes—a quartet of criminals and lawmen entangled in a meticulously plotted heist. Yet the quote’s portentousness feels unearned, a pretentious veneer for what is, at its core, a conventional caper narrative. Unlike Le Samouraï, where existential minimalism amplified the protagonist’s alienation, Le Cercle Rouge’s metaphysical posturing distracts rather than deepens, straining to imbue its characters with a gravitas the script never fully substantiates.
The film orbits four archetypal figures: Corey (Alain Delon), a freshly paroled thief enlisted by a corrupt prison guard for a Parisian jewellery heist; Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté), a fugitive murderer who stows away in Corey’s car after escaping custody; Jansen (Yves Montand), a disgraced ex-cop and alcoholic marksman recruited for his technical genius; and Mattei (Bourvil), the tenacious inspector hellbent on recapturing Vogel. Their paths converge with clinical inevitability, yet Melville prioritises mood over motive, reducing his characters to ciphers in a meticulously choreographed ballet of crime.
Delon’s Corey epitomises Melville’s fetishisation of stoic masculinity—all razor-sharp cheekbones and impenetrable silence—but offers no interiority beyond a grudge against Rico (André Ekyan), a former associate who usurped his girlfriend (played by Anna Douking). Volonté’s Vogel, though electrifying in his feral intensity, remains similarly opaque, a force of chaos with neither backstory nor rationale. Only Montand’s Jansen escapes this emotional vacuum, his haunting portrayal of a man haunted by sobriety—particularly a hallucination sequence where spectral creatures invade his bed—hinting at depths the script otherwise neglects. Bourvil, best known for comic roles, delivers the film’s most nuanced performance as Mattei, blending weary determination with eccentric charm (his affection for his cats a rare humanising touch). Serbian director Slobodan Šijan would later homage Mattei in his crime comedy The Strangler vs. The Strangler (1984), a testament to the character’s enduring intrigue.
Le Cercle rouge’s pièce de résistance is its 20-minute heist sequence, a wordless, music-free symphony of precision. Filmed in real time, the scene revels in the minutiae of the crew’s method: Jansen’s laser-guided dismantling of alarms, Corey’s steady pilfering of gems, Vogel’s vigilant lookout. The absence of faces (the men don masks) and score amplifies the tension, transforming the act into a hypnotic meditation on professionalism. Yet this brilliance arrives halfway through the film, preceded by an hour of lethargic setup—police interrogations, underworld negotiations, Santi (François Périer)’s nightclub machinations—that mirrors the heist’s deliberateness without its urgency. Melville’s refusal to differentiate pacing between mundane conversations and high-stakes action renders the film’s rhythm monotonous, its stylistic austerity curdling into tedium.
Cinematographer Henri Decaë bathes the film in a palette of steely blues and ashen greys, evoking the chiaroscuro of classic noir despite its colour format. The influence of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) looms large, particularly in the clinical depiction of criminal logistics and the moral ambiguity of its ensemble. Yet Melville’s aesthetic choices—while undeniably striking—often feel at odds with the narrative. The near-absence of non-diegetic music (a hallmark of his work) amplifies the alienation but exacerbates the glacial pace, while Éric Demarsan’s sporadic jazz score, though fitting in Santi’s nightclub, jars against the otherwise austere soundscape.
At 140 minutes, Le Cercle rouge demands a patience increasingly alien to modern audiences reared on kinetic storytelling. Yet its flaws extend beyond length: the rushed finale, which sees the crew’s meticulously planned heist unravel through a contrived melodrama of betrayal and retribution, clashes tonally with the preceding rigor. Mattei’s abrupt triumph feels unearned, a concession to convention at odds with Melville’s signature fatalism.
Le Cercle rouge remains a film of contradictions—a work of breathtaking artistry hampered by its own grandiosity. Melville’s command of mood and composition is peerless, his cast uniformly magnetic, and the heist sequence a masterclass in suspense. Yet for all its virtues, the film lacks the narrative economy and emotional resonance of his earlier triumphs. In striving to craft a magnum opus, Melville forgot that in crime cinema—as in Gautama’s fictive proverb—the tightest circles are those drawn with the steadiest hand.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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