13/10/2005

Return to film noir for Alain Corneau who is preparing the remake of the 1966 feature from the cult director Jean-Pierre Melville: Le deuxième souffle. Cast for the project developed by Michèle and Laurent Pétin for ARP features Monica Bellucci, Daniel Auteuil and Fabrice Luchini. According to the details given to Cineuropa by the director, shooting should start in the second semester of 2006. originally played by Lino Ventura, Le deuxième souffle retraces the misadventures of an gangster who escapes from prison and who wants to quit the crime world. Having killed a criminal as pay-back, he goes to Marseille to head abroad with his girlfriend. But a lack of money forces him to accept a job, a hold-up, to settle accounts with the victim’s brother, all this with the cops on his tail. br>
Treated since his debut as the inheritor of Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Corneau made 5 thrillers between 1973 and1981 (France, société anonyme, La menace, Police Python 357, Série noire and Le Choix des armes) before turning to other genres, but with a brief detour to a police story with Le Cousin in 1998. So, for his 15th fiction feature, he returns to source, taking on a mythical film admired notably by Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, John Woo and Quentin Tarantino. Master of French film noir with films such Bob le flambeur, Le Doulos, Le Samouraï and also Le Cercle rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville (1917 – 1973) explored the themes of solitude and death, fatality and dignity, noblesse in the dark criminal underworld, with a fascination for taciturn heroes. According to Alain Corneau, "Le deuxième souffle is exceptional, it’s a cinema that brings the noblesse to the noir genre".

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(Translated from French)