Romy Schneider in “Max et les Ferrailleurs”, 1971
A bleak, dark detective story that taps into noir, Claude Sautet’s Max et les ferrailleurs is more than a “policier” film. It draws two fine character studies: Michel Piccoli’s Max, a former judge converted into a cop, and Romy Schneider’s Lily, a prostitute linked to a gang of hard-luck, two-time crooks whom Max wants to catch in order to restore his recently tarnished reputation in the department.
But Max is “no ordinary policeman”, as his superior says. Independently wealthy, he renounced being an examining judge because he wanted to be in the midst of the action. His job is more than a job. He is a solitary, no-family man, a dedicated, methodical police detective, even amoral in his willingness to catch the criminals at all costs, even if this means planning the crime himself. Catching them red-handed becomes an obsession and his job is more like a rite to him, nothing deters him from his mission, and this monastic feeling that seems driven by an inner calling rather than policeman duty and righteousness, is evident in the way he dresses, too. His pin-striped black suit, white shirt, black tie and fedora hat are like a uniform (he is always buttoned-up, even when at home, playing cards), very much in the vein of Alain Delon’s Le Samouraï, or, as a matter of fact, a few others of Jean-Pierre Melville’s anti-heroes. The look in Max’s eyes, when filmed in close-up, is so blank and unflinching that he may very well be carrying a gun in his hands (you are almost surprised that he doesn’t when the camera moves away), that, indeed, he may very well be one of the criminals. Sautet inverts in fact the moral dilemma of the crime film and makes the criminals more sympathetic than the lawman. Nothing can disturb Max’s icy exterior, nothing distracts his attention, not even Lily. She is no ordinary prostitute either. She is the brain behind the gang of small-time criminals and it is her ambition that will get them all into trouble. Romy and Michel were friends and had a wonderful rapport on the screen, and worked together on a few Claude Sautet films – Piccoli was in fact reticent to accept the role of Max because he considered Sautet shouldn’t have brought him and Romy back together on screen so soon (they had made Les choses de la vie a year earlier).
Romy Schneider is again wearing Yves Saint Laurent in Max et les ferrailleurs. But this in no way distracts us from the plot. Because Yves Saint Laurent had an “immediate and astounding sense of costume”, in the words of Roland Petit. The designer chose a very sexy wardrobe for Romy in this film. Violet or red low-cut dresses, form-fitting black dress with plunging neckline, ribbon tied around the neck, and the black patent trench coat – the revival of the vinyl trench five years after Catherine Deneuve wore hers for another prostitute role, that of Severine in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour.
But if there is one sartorial moment that surpasses all the rest, it’s Lily wearing Max’s hat. When Lily takes a bath in Max’s apartment, he throws her his hat, the item he almost never parts with, and takes pictures of her naked but wearing his hat. It is Max who is playing her, paying her not for sex but for spending time with him, toying with her body and her emotions to scheme his plan. But using her for criminal thought inception won’t leave him unscathed. He does have a breaking point but it remains unseen right until the end. And the end will take us completely by surprise. This impenetrable character is all the more surprising, brilliantly conceived and played, as he is playing opposite one of the most beautiful and enigmatic women in the history of cinema, Romy Schneider.
Jean Seberg in “À bout de souffle”, 1960
In a rare interview talking about À bout de souffle, taken just before shooting a scene from the film, Jean Seberg, dressed in the striped dress that her character, Patricia, wears in the film, said that Godard described her character as “the one in Bonjour Tristesse two years later”. Godard was a cinephile and when he went from the front of the camera as editor of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, to behind the camera as a film-maker, he frequently made allusions to his director peers whom he admired. There are many “film in film” sequences in Breathless, such as the one when Patricia hides in a cinema, the famous Le Mac Mahon, from the police, where the show that they are announcing next is Preminger’s very own Whirlpool (1949), or the stack of Screen Time magazines scattered on the table in Patricia’s apartment, or the film posters popping up throughout the film on the streets of Paris.
Further discussing her character, Seberg depicted her as “a very franchised American girl, a very sophisticated American girl, I suppose what some would call a very liberated American girl”. Belmondo, a young man on the run in Paris, is her boyfriend. He was one of the anti-heroes of La nouvelle vague. She was the anti-heroine of this new cinema that had new life in it, that questioned the establishment, that wanted to experiment in new ways with everything.
And experiment with everything they did, including costumes. The film does not credit any costume designer for the wardrobes. It is very likely that Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg made their own sartorial choices or even wore their own clothes on set. Never paying with his hat, sunglasses and cigarette, he set the standard for smoky French sex appeal, and she, with her infusion of French charm into her American sporty, preppy style (just like Seberg in real life), finally made a big entrance on screen and would be admired and copied by the worldwide public for generations to come, creating the stereotype of the French gamine. She is all light and cool and mischief. Patricia Franchini, an American student working for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune in Paris and an aspiring journalist, made style news with her pixie haircut, black eyeliner and a wardrobe packed with sailor stripes, oversized men’s shirts, ballet slippers, loafers, trench coat, skinny pants and the Trilby hat borrowed from Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel Poiccard.
It is he however who first lends her the hat, if only for a few minutes, in the car parking lot before he flees for a few minutes. It looks good on her, dressed as she is in a pleated skirt and Breton top, a sudden American infussion into her French look. Godard consciously sought models in the past, in earlier films and filmmakers, maybe more than any other filmmaker. In Breathless, Michel has a smart attitude and a serious Bogart obsession, modelling himself on the Humphrey Bogart of Warner’s gangster movies – hat perched on the head, cigarette permanently dangling from his lips, his roaming outside the cinema where lobby cards and film posters starring Bogart are displayed, and finally his mock-heroic salute to his movie idol when he meets his end. That moment when Belmondo takes off his hat and puts it on Jean Seberg might have had another influence though, further back still than Bogart and the American genres that inspired Godard from his writer days at Cahiers. According to Shiguéhiko Hasumi, who wrote Directed by Ozu, only recently translated into English, Godard could have gotten the idea from the Japanese filmmaker’s That Night’s Wife.
Emiko Yagumo in “That Night’s Wife”, 1930
Yasujirō Ozu’s That Night’s Wife concerns a simple salaryman who is driven to desperation and commits armed robbery in order to provide for his sick daughter’s medical care. In the midst of the night he escapes to his apartment, where he confesses to his wife what he has done. Soon there is a knock at the door and the wife, Emiko Yagumo, urges her husband to hide behind the curtains. What follows is marked by a sartorial story that could hardly go unnoticed and it is Shiguéhiko Hasumi who most beautifully describes the scene in his book dedicated to Ozu: “The detective, who seems to have borrowed his rugged look from George Bancroft and his stout build from Walter Huston – a name legible on a movie poster hanging in the background – peers hawk-eyed into the room before announcing that he will just wait if her husband is out, pushing his way inside. Okada has left his hat on the table. As if to reproach the wife for her lie, the detective picks it up and places it gently on her hair, which is wrapped into a bun in the back.”
Emiko Yagumo in “That Night’s Wife”, 1930
“This moment in particular is very moving,” the author continues. “Emiko Yagumo, wearing the bun and kimono typical of a Japanese housewife, removes the hat with a slow gesture. But before she does, her eyes point toward the floor, as if she has resolved to do something. Or rather, it seems that this fedora has introduced a transformation into the narrative, in covering her hair for only a brief moment and contrasting with her kimono. In fact, when the detective then senses the presence of the husband in the shadows and draws his guns the wife receives the pistol she has been concealing and sticks it in his back. But she does not stop there. Having disarmed him, she strikes a pose with arms akimbo, brandishing both her weapon and his. What is especially beautiful in this That’s Night’s Wife sequence is the emphasis on the sartorial disequilibrium of Yagumo clutching handguns while wearing a housewife’s kimono.” A sartorial imbalance that has the power to subtly but unequivocally transform the character from a mother attending to her sick daughter into a woman fighting for a husband.
Shiguéhiko Hasumi concludes that “it is also hard not to be distracted by the more fantastic, perhaps implausible, idea that the Jean-Luc Godard who accessories Jean Seberg with Belmondo’s fedora in Breathless might quietly have seen this silent Ozu masterpiece.” The fedora on Yagumo’s hair bun performs an unmistakable narrational function, something that is totally missing from Godard’s Breathless. For all the irresistible appeal and determined unconformity of Belmondo and Seberg, her wearing her boyfriend’s hat is much more ornamentation than anything else. But maybe that was the magic in it. There were no rules, Godard seems to say, not in the way he filmed, not in the way they acted, not in the way they looked, and that feeling must have been mighty freeing. We feel it as we go back watching it time and again.
Editorial sources (from personal film book collection – please refer to Classiq Journal if you use quotes cited here): “Le Paris de Claude Sautet: Romy, Michel, Yves et les autres…”, by Hélène Rochette; “Godard on Godard”, translated and edited by Tom Milne; “Directed by Ozu”, by Shiguéhiko Hasumi
Jean Seberg in “À bout de souffle”, 1960
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