Classici Fuori Mostra - Le cercle rouge (The red circle)

«Jean-Pierre Melville’s is apparently an exciting noir about the meticulous preparation and enactment of a nighttime robbery in a famous jewellery store in Place Vendôme. But, as is always the case in the films of this great French auteur, the clichés of a caper story have been seeped in a melancholy contemplation of the randomness, uselessness and solitude inherent in the human condition. Le cercle rouge may seem realistic, for the precision of its details and the real continuity of actions it portrays (such as the robbery, which lasts twenty-five minutes), but in fact Melville disseminates and multiplies a series of subtle, deliberate and alienating improbabilities that give the film an almost dreamlike atmosphere, thanks in part to the magnificent cinematography by Henri Decaë and his metallic blue palette» (Roberto Chiesi).