Watch The Second Wind For Free

Waste of time

Fresh and Exciting

A Disappointing Continuation

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

The gangster genre under Melville was always a little philosophical, a little Sartrean, as it examined the motives of men in the world of crime. It added an extra chic to an otherwise American style of story telling set amongst alleys and bars and clouds of cigarette smoke.That style can also lead into pretentiousness, as though the thinness of the story and the genre form of the characters can be raised to higher art if it is treated as long drama. But to do that, deeper themes need exploring, the capacity to be a writer, a filmmaker, of real effect is required and that is not possible in the strict genre of gangster movies.Unfortunately what is on offer here is simple but overly long. It's pompous. It seems as if there might be something more to it but there isn't. The story has been seen many times before and this treatment at two and half hours could be cut by 40 minutes without any loss. The extra tracking shots; the shots with the cars all leaving a street in real time could be cut because we know what happens, the cars go to another place. Easy. The windy long dialog, which is not very engaging could be shortened and made tougher just like gangster pictures were once made. These are men talk in stabs and gunshots.But of greater weakness is the entire ensemble cast and especially Auteuil who should never have been chosen, he brings too many other roles to this and he lacks the beady eyed killer instinct. Bellucci is not very involved but for her Brigitte Bardot hairstyle and Dutronc does what Dutronc often does. Consequently the hats take over as every male has one and the lighting is all yellow and green filter throughout perhaps to represent the past so the overall effect is like an adults comic book, or some other pastiche of the genre because the story may be too tired and unable to be delivered straight. The feeling when it's over and done is also faintly philosophical: two and half hours have passed and you are older but perhaps no wiser for losing the time.

This bombed in France last year but one doesn't write off the likes of Alain Corneau and Daniel Auteuil lightly so when it surfaced at the French Film Festival in London I was present and correct. By a strange coincidence Phil Corneau - apparently no connection with Alain despite copping a prestigious French Award - made a short with the same title a few years ago but this is, of course, a remake of the Jean-Pierre Melville entry now just over forty years old. Daniel Auteuil is indisputably a superior actor to Lino Ventura, who created the role of 'Gu' Minda for Melville but Ventura inhabited the role of Minda in a way that appears beyond Auteuil though honors are divided more or less evenly between Paul Meurisse and Michel Blanc in the role of the intrepid cop determined to bring Minda down. The third lead, Monica Belucci is, of course, a joke as an actress and there's a woeful lack of chemistry between her and Auteuil - or indeed anyone with whom she shares a scene. Jacques Dutronc is arguably the best actor on display or, more accurately, the actor who best adapts his style to this particular film. Corneau opted for a bizarre color, something between Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy and South Pacific and if, as seems probably, he did so inn order that the final sequence, over the end credits, could revert to a 'normal' color and make the point that there is indeed a 'normal' i.e. non-gangster world out there it seems an awful lot of trouble to make such a small point. Worth a look. Just.

There's already a heavy legacy of polar noir, gangster films, in France. What's really left after Jean Gabin, Belmondo, Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Melville? Of course the addictive detective novelist Georges Simenon wrote dozens and dozens of compelling novels. Bela Tarr just adapted one of the more obscure ones. And why not have a stab at it? This movie shows you why not. The only thing justifying a director as known as Alain Corneau (Tous les matins du monde, with Depardieu and son; Fear and Trembling, with Sylvie Testud) being attached to it is that he got name actors, headed by Daniel Auteuil (in a little mustache that makes him look bloated) and Monica Bellucci (who'd look better here if she were blowsier and tackier and more soulful, as Simone Signoret was). This is the degeneration of a genre and a tradition that reached perfection in the Fifties and Sixties in France. Arguably French crime movies have succeeded better of late by following new American models, in slum-revolt stuff like Jean-François Richet's 1997 Ma 6-T va crack-er ("My City Is Going To Crack") or updated caper knockoffs like Florent Emilio Siri's 2002 Nid de guêpes (Nest of Vipers). Todd McCarthy's Variety review of Corneau's new film says, "it will be a hard sell Stateside, where its style and substance will appear both out of step and out of date." Correct. Seen in Paris with a sparse middle-aged audience, it looked like a strictly local artifact.I don't believe I've seen the 1966 Jean-Pierre Melville version of this Jose Giovanni novel about an escaped lifer who stages that one last big job to raise the money to leave the country. But after seeing the bargain basement Brian De Palma nightclub shootout in ugly, garish color that opens Corneau's new film, I kept thinking of the wonderful bank robbery that begins Melville's 1972 Un flic/A Cop. This garish look may be meant to echo recent US graphic novel celluloid; if so that's just another miscalculation. Where Melville was sparse understatement, Corneau's sequence is clumsy excess. It's preceded by an escape sequence featuring Auteuil as main character Gu (Gustave Minda) that is so brief it fails to establish context. The nightclub scene that blasts the opening away is so noisy it also overwhelms most of the action that follows.Gu in Melville's version was played by Lino Ventura. He himself seemed always stolid and second rate, but in a brave, determined sort of way that was noir personified; and he shines in recent memory through the recent revival of Melville's resistance study, Army of Shadows. Auteuil has none of that inner-ness; he's pure bluster. Auteuil's perpetually uncomfortable look works well enough in a comedy like The Valet and My Best Friend. Michael Haneke used it brilliantly and on a far higher level in his 2005 Caché. The look seems out of place in a gangster condemned to life who initiates one last big job--a desperate man of desperate courage. In Melville's version, Paul Meurisse plays Gu's adversary, the foxy Commissaire Blot. We also remember the wonderfully mournful-countenanced Meurice from Army of Shadows. Corneau uses Michel Blanc, a little bullish man with an annoying cockiness. Where is suave disdain when we need it?The big robbery of some trucks that involves killing people (and more garish reds) is fairly effective, but is the kind of sequence that, as McCarthy noted, has been done many times before by a Hollywood that has moved on to other things. Corneau's staging has none of the kinetic energy of the warehouse robbery in Siri's Nest of Vipers (and even that was just able mimicry of recent American movies).This is a Sixties story that keeps introducing Forties and Fifties cars. The sense of period is as shaky as the awareness of what's up-to-date.Some of the French critics seem to have been impressed by the flashy colors and flamboyant acting of Corneau's remake. They are impressed by a roster of other actors with good recent track records that includes Jacques Dutronc, Eric Cantona, Philippe Nahon, Gilbert Melki, Jean-Paul Bonnaire--lots of reliable pros here. But that doesn't make this a good movie, or make up for the lack of chemistry between Auteuil and Bellucci. At two hours and thirty-five minutes, this is an albatross as well as a travesty.

Based on the novel Un Reglement de Comptes by Jose Giovanni on which legendary auteur Jean-Pierre Melville based his classic 1966 film, one has to admire the balls on Alain Corneau for tackling the same source material. A more colorful adaptation of the Giovanni novel, SECOND BREATH rejects all things black and white. Headlamps are amber and there's even a jaundiced light over black and white crime scene photos. In fact, Corneau's SECOND BREATH isn't just colorful; it's garish. Hues are saturated to stratospheric levels.Apart from the color and some intensified violence, Corneau's version of SECOND BREATH is an exercise in redundancy for fans of the original Melville film. It's not to say that Corneau's film is bad by any stretch of the imagination. It's simply just not necessary.