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.

Good plot with great actors, but they seem to act like beginners! This movie is a bad copy of Michel Audiard style dialogs, no where near as funny. The actors seem board stiff. Did they need cash that bad?! I haven't seen the original movie with Lino Ventura, but I'm keen on watching it to be able to compare. The picture is fuzzy and the sound bad (I didn't understand all the dialogs), but perhaps this was due to the cinema, which is a local one (250 seats, one film at a time, but really cheap entry!). This movie is just not worth it.

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.