Un Flic

The great Melville's thirteenth and last film - another French gangster thriller filtered through American hard-nosed conventions - is stylistically his most pared-down. Aside from the two set-piece heists, as ingeniously planned and meticulously shot as ever, the connecting storyline of an increasingly inept 'flic' (Delon) pursuing his alter ego across a darkening urban landscape has a near psychotic disregard for place, time or even plot, but total coherence in terms of mood - more blue than noir. A bitter meditation on disenchantment and defeat, as glacial and hermetic as Deneuve's face. CPea.