Lino Ventura cuts a menacing figure in Claude Sautet’s Classe tous risques (Criterion, $31.96 Blu-ray, $23.96 DVD). Maintaining a detached exterior even when his measures grow increasingly desperate, his character, a gangster-on-the-lam named Abel Davos, keeps a stoic demeanor punctuated by fits of volcanic temper. Sentenced to death in his native France, he first appears as an escapee in bustling Milan, where his hideaway from the authorities is on the verge of detection by an omnipresent police force.
So he decides to return to Paris, where he had built a network of accomplices in the city’s shadows, even if it means traveling treacherous routes with his wife and two young children. An underworld road movie of sorts, Classe tous risques follows Abel’s fatalistic odyssey, from stolen cars to hijacked speedboats to black-market ambulances, all the while exploiting his former associates for favors extended or returned, burning every bridge in the increasingly unsteady architecture of his day-to-day life.
An existential crime movie of the highest order, Classe tous risques was released in 1960, a pivotal time for French cinema. The Nouvelle Vague was in its infancy, with Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda and Claude Chabrol having just released their debut features. This sophomore feature, too, was a disarming step forward for Sautet, formerly an assistant director on more-conventional genre films, though it’s not a title mentioned in the New Wave pantheon. A box-office and critical flop upon its initial release — its melancholic tone and anticlimactic plotting likely confounded audiences looking for a propulsive shoot-’em-up — the film today looks like a separate but equal corollary to the New Wave’s revolutionary ethos, whose poker-faced style feels like a harbinger to the work of directors such as Jean-Pierre Melville, Michelangelo Antonioni and James Gray.
In a vintage documentary about Sautet included in the Criterion disc, the director argues for the “physicality” of his approach to filmmaking, preferring a “pure cinema” storytelling style that favors visuals over dialogue. While the script, written from personal experience by the criminal-turned-novelist José Giovanni, is rife with rugged realism, the movie’s central gift is indeed the chilling detachment of its moving images. Acts of violence are swift, matter-of-fact and devoid of the theatricality that the New Wavers properly rebelled against. And Sautet has a deft, detail-driven eye for the interiors of the Parisian underworld — the shady hotels and bistros, the monastic sleeping quarters, the unscrupulous diamond dealers — in which Abel drifts in and out like a bad memory.
And Sautet also has Jean-Paul Belmondo, fresh from his breakthrough role in Godard’s Breathless, as a small-time freelance hood hired to drive Abel, in that ersatz ambulance, to various safe houses. If his antihero of Breathless had somehow escaped his death, this might be where’d be a year later, subsisting on the legal fringes but with a sense of morality gnawing at his knee-jerk nihilism.
While hiding Abel in the back of the hospital, Belmondo’s Eric Stark notices a woman being abused by her boyfriend in the roadside. He dispatches the abuser and offers her a lift. He soon begins a relationship with the woman, an actress in a traveling theater troupe, that could imperil his professional life. It’s telling that even though Belmondo doesn’t appear until 40 minutes into the picture, Sautet can’t seem to avert his gaze from the supporting actor’s puckish charisma, to the point that Belmondo nearly steals the narrative from Ventura.
Ultimately, though, the script’s most memorable line is Ventura’s, in a rare acknowledgment of the increasingly perilous, friendless oblivion in which he has found himself: “You slip a little more every day, until you’re nothing.” Few if any anti-gangster movies have put it better.
****
Meanwhile, whether you find the result frustrating or innovative — I lean toward the latter but can appreciate the former — Zodiac Killer Project (Music Box, $34.99 Blu-ray, $21.28 DVD) is probably unlike any film you’ve seen. As he tells it in voice-over early in this self-aware experiment, British filmmaker Charlie Shackleton had attempted to make a true crime documentary adaptation of The Zodiac Killer Cover-up, a 2012 book by Lyndon Lafferty, a California highway patrolman who spent 32 years investigating and obsessing over this notorious string of murders in the San Francisco Bay Area. Shackleton wrote a script and planned the storyboards, only for Lafferty’s estate to pull out of the project at the 11th hour, depriving him of the rights to his primary source.
So instead, Shackleton made a movie about his inability to make the movie he wanted to make. Zodiac Killer Project is composed largely of lengthy, languid location shots and driving footage where Shackleton’s dramatic reenactments of Lafferty’s book would have taken place — a placid rest stop where Lafferty first laid eyes on the man he believed to be the killer, the exterior of the creepy house where the suspect lived — overlaid with Shackleton’s audio commentary about his intentions for every moment. “F**k, it would have been good,” he adds, at the end of describing the film’s inciting incident. (Wittily, the Blu-ray includes an “uncommentary track,” featuring only the visuals with Shackleton’s voice-overs removed, transforming his project into a kind of Zen meditation.)
Zodiac Killer Project is rife with such wouldas, shouldas and couldas, of ambitious ideas squelched by circumstance. It is an inherently navel-gazing documentary, only a few steps removed from a taped podcast. It is occasionally even dull. But through his many meta workarounds, Shackleton manages to cleverly skewer the clichés of true-crime docs by cheekily absorbing their conventions.
His history as a maker of essay films comes across here in montages from series such as Making a Murderer, Amanda Knox, The Jinx and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark that expose their common narrative argot: the so-called “evocative B-roll” of faceless actors wheeling reams of legal documents through poorly lit hallways, microfiche whizzing across a boxy computer screen, bullet casings bouncing off concrete floors, the interrogation-room light fixture that always seems to be inexplicably swinging. These associative collages are such the bread and butter of Shackleton’s M.O. — he’s made docs about horror cinema and teen cinema using repurposed footage — that one wonders if the botched vision for his original Zodiac Killer project isn’t his own jinx on all of us, and that his deconstructed approach was always the intention.
At any rate, the theater of the mind can be as powerful as any form of dramaturgy. Through the flexing of our imagination and an adequately eerie score, we lose little of the narrative tension that a more traditional telling would have foregrounded. In de-dramatizing Lafferty’s investigation, Shackleton still manages to tell a suspenseful story while simultaneously satirizing its formula.