is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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du Rififi chez nous.
Gus and I watched Jules Dassin's Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes the other night... I've seen it many times but he never had. I appreciate its unsentimental look at what we nowadays call thug life, its 60s noir sensibilities, the attention to all the time it takes to plan a successful heist, and I love the 20 minutes of silence that happen during the heist (though some aspects of the silence just don't make sense: as Gus pointed out, there is no reason why the cops were also saying nothing when they were checking out the stolen vehicle, etc.).
Rififi means something like thug life or battle or tough-guy in French. It is one of those untranslatable words.
Watching the film this time, it occurred to me that the movie has some things in common with another of my favorite films, Steven Soderbergh's The Limey. If you haven't seen it, SEE IT. Both are about thug life. Both have messages about how the freedom of being an outlaw necessarily cuts into a person's ability to have meaningful human connections. The Limey is more about the differences between memory, history and nostalgia, and might seem to have a more obvious moral message about what really tends to matter to human beings.
But there is something very subtle in the way Dassin lets the women make one of the main points of Rififi, given that the world it depicts is a world where women don't matter at all. Women in the film are always one of these things: arm candy, owned by men, used for housework, told to shut up, beaten, scantily clad, or some combination thereof. It is fairly brutal.
But there's a scene where, after a child of one of the gangsters has been kidnapped and his wife has been drugged so she can handle the stress, she says to her husband something like: "I want to know one thing. Many people grow up in poverty, with nothing. And yet only a few of them become thugs." (In french, the word I'm calling "thug" is "dur" or hard, and yes, that's what she said.) She continues: "I think it is all the ones who didn't become thugs who are actually tough/dur." And that is the only moralizing moment of the movie (beyond the moments where the gangsters enforce their own code... every group has a set of rules, so that law is everywhere, even amongst the lawless...).
The way the film ends lends creedence to this reading, but I won't say more because it would be a spoiler.
I hadn't noticed that before... and so I hadn't drawn the parallel to The Limey. Both movies are, on some level (even though neither movie's content depicts this), about children and women who won't have fathers and husbands because a bunch of men have an idea of freedom that simply is not compatible with living together with other human beings.
I'm tempted to say this is also an idea of freedom that animates the unspoken assumptions of many U.S. citizens, especially all of those, on every side of current political issues, who only want all-or-nothing... which is the ultimate anti-political stance.
12:12 p.m. - December 14, 2010
Gus - 2010-12-14 19:20:12
In the last scene, the kid is meant to embody all you're describing--yet he's also the precious cargo that the mother (and we) are focused on. It was such a hyperbolic spectacle of this paradox.
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