Continuing through the filmography of Jean-Pierre Melville, here’s a film that is known as being one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorites. The intertitles explain that the title is slang referring to a police informant and so the audience is lead to wonder which character is the real informant the whole time. This is a twist movie that is only really good for watching once and I can’t say anything about it without spoiling it. So consider yourself warned if you continue reading. I admit that its gimmick is original and the visuals are beautiful but I wouldn’t consider this a great film.

Soon after he has been released from prison, Maurice Faugel visits a friend Gilbert who is sorting jewels to sell from a recent heist. Maurice himself is planning to commit a robbery the next day and Gilbert freely gives him a gun to help out. However Maurice immediately shoots Gilbert with the gun, steals his money and jewels and buries them under a lamppost. Later at the apartment of his girlfriend Thérèse, Maurice meets another friend Silien who provides him with safecracking equipment for his robbery. After he leaves Silien returns to torture Thérèse until she reveals the address of the house Maurice is targeting. Indeed the police arrive during the robbery resulting in Maurice being injured while fleeing and his accomplice Rémy and the supervising police officer Salignari are both killed. A car pulls up just as Maurice falls unconscious and he wakes up in the apartment of another friend but isn’t sure who saved him. Even as he plots revenge against Silien, the latter is picked up by the police for questioning about the murder of Gilbert and the botched robbery.

So far so normal for a film about scumbag gangsters, right? Yet the whole point of this film is that appearances are deceptive and the opening explanation about informants is meant to mislead the audience. You can parse every event as it happens but you just get more and more confused about the motivations and character of Maurice and Silien. The film is superbly crafted with beautiful camera work and great performances, which helps highlight how disturbing the behavior of the characters is. Gilbert is nothing but solicitous to Maurice so what kind of man he is to kill his friend with his own gun? Maurice assures Thérèse that Silien can be trusted yet the moment he catches her alone, Silien slaps her until she falls unconscious and ties her up to interrogate her about Maurice’s plans. The apparent evil of both characters lead us to all kinds of assumptions when Silien speaks to the police or when he tries to pump the girlfriend of yet another gangster for information. There’s a twist of course so major spoilers follow from here on out.

The surprise, to Maurice as much as the audience, is that Silien is a loyal friend and has been helping throughout. He realized that Thérèse is a police informant and not only interrogated her to save Maurice from the police crackdown but had her killed! Plus he even eliminated two other gangsters in a complicated manner just to get Maurice off the hook for the murder of Gilbert. That first murder is justified by the film in that while Gilbert is solicitous to Maurice, he also had his wife killed while he was in prison just in case she was a police informant. I have to say that the twist is certainly shocking and it does explain the motivation for Silien’s actions which seemed unfathomable. However this is the kind of trick that works just once and doesn’t really make sense in any larger context. We’re led to believe that Silien is loyal to Maurice but cares nothing for any of his other criminal compatriots. It also basically treats other characters such as Jean as being inconsequential.

I enjoyed this because it looks really good and the twist has real shock value, particularly because I didn’t expect it from a film from this era. But it’s not like it has anything interesting to say about gangsters or human nature in general. I would be really annoyed to see this in a modern film as it gets a pass simply because this must have been novel at the time but it’s very much not one of the cinematic greats.