Le Cercle Rouge: A heist film par excellence.

BOLD STATEMENT WARNING! TURN BACK BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE....!
Ahem..."Le Cercle Rouge" is the heist movie to end all heist movies. A steely-cold tale rife with a certain subtle melancholia accentuated by an infatuation with predestination and fatalism. It's a movie populated by noble men with unspoken codes of honor and wounded pasts, and it's goddamn beautiful.

The film opens with a Buddhist epigraph (Concocted by the director) concerning predestination, and how when men meet, they will inevitably meet within "The Red Circle". We are then presented with two seemingly unrelated threads. Corey (Played by the devilishly cool Delon) is an imprisoned con given a deal by a crooked prison guard. He'll let him out a year early if he participates in the robbery of a jeweler he's got insider info on. Corey agrees and is unleashed upon the world.

Our other thread concerns a criminal named Vogel and his current keeper Inspector Mattei. Vogel's being transported to an unspecified destination where he'll likely be found guilty of whatever crime he committed. He manages to make a daring escape and strikes out through the French countryside, leaving Mattei with virtually nothing to go on. Despite this, Mattei seems nonplussed, as though he's fairly certain he'll have a run in with his prey at a later time.
And thus, the wheels of fate begin to turn. The more the viewer watches, the more inescapable the ultimate fate of the characters involved becomes.

 Presented in a palette of washed out colors, "Le Cercle Rouge" looks cool, temperature wise and in terms of it's style. Blue, grey, white, and black dominate every locale, the way the characters dress and the interiors of all the buildings we are presented with. One could argue that the set decorator was possibly afflicted with melancholia, if it didn't seem so deliberate.

The characters themselves are just as cool. Delon plays Corey like a more charming (Maybe more human) version of Jeff from "Le Samourai". Sure he's a crook and he won't hesitate to plug someone if they threaten his freedom, but he seems a gentleman robber of sorts, as though he's part of a dying breed. Mattei is wonderfully played by Andre Bourvil, who's somehow the sweetest policeman to ever be put on film (Watch for his brief stop at home, where he panders to his three cats). Though he's essentially the antagonist, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more sympathetic antagonist in any form of fiction. Yves Montand is strong as an alcoholic ex-cop who joins Delon's gang. It's also thanks to his ailment that the audience is treated to a rather vivid nightmare sequence that gives me further grounds for not trusting my closet.

Oh, and they're process shots. WIN!

Throughout the course of the movie, the viewer learns more and more about the men warring against one another. Little snippets of their pasts are muttered here and there and if one pays attention, the objects and photographs within their respective abodes hint at loves lost and past lives long gone. It becomes evident near the end that all these men are connected by the proverbial red circle. Whether it's the thing that binds them or the thing they're trapped within, I'm unsure, but it certainly separates them from "normal" humanity.

Thus what we witness seems to play out on a mythic scale, despite it's somewhat low-key nature. All the characters involved within the story haven't been heading towards the red circle, they've been within it's boundaries all along. The ending of the movie is naught but the ultimate conclusion of this fact. If you're living in a film by Jean-Pierre Melville, your destiny is inescapable, so buck up buddy.