In the Flesh: Rififi

“Hold your balloon tight,” says the nameless father of a nameless child as the pair see little Tonio’s (Dominique Maurin) balloon string cut by a slammed car door. “See what can happen to it?” Rififi poses this same question again and again, driving us to ask ourselves what we want and, more importantly, how to keep hold of it once it’s ours. “I dunno,” replies embittered and aging career criminal Tony “le Stéphanois” (Jean Servais) when asked what he plans to do with the proceeds of the jewel heist around which the film revolves. “Let’s not start spending it yet.” It’s an existential directionlessness which dogs le Stéphanois throughout the film. He beats and ridicules the mistress he left behind during his stay in prison. He throws what little he has away in backroom poker games. His determination to push his fellow criminals into a bigger, more dangerous job has less to do with netting a larger reward to open up their futures than it does with reaching on his own terms for the death incipient in every cough that wracks his failing body.

The traits that make Rififi’s cast of jewel thieves so uniquely capable in their chosen profession also make them uniquely terrible at navigating the aftermath of their success. The four men train themselves to act as a single mechanism, outsmarting a then-cutting-edge alarm system and penetrating a massive steel safe after breaking into the building housing them via an elaborate act of manual and contained demolition involving pry bars, quilts, and an umbrella. The heist unfolds in silence, stretching on for nearly half an hour as tension mounts, new factors cropping up unexpectedly to jam and obstruct the perfect functioning of the machine. By the sequence’s end, just as relief washes over the film, we’ve seen every action and behavior that will result in Rififi’s bloody, gutting final act. Without a specific objective to unite them, the team begins making mistakes almost immediately. A gift to the wrong girl. A night at the wrong club. Their mechanical precision can find no purchase in the disordered and chaotic world of human interaction.

So, things fall apart. Motivations diverge and with no guiding vision the threads of the lives of the four come into conflict. Self-destruction. The film turns on a dime from heist to revenge noir, its perspective exploding outwards from the cramped rooms and tight focus of its first two acts into expansive outdoor shots of Paris and maze-like, unfinished interiors. The men are seldom together, and never more than two of them at once. The world intrudes, huge and bright and incomprehensibly complex, and with it come gaunt and leering predators, jackals in tastelessly expensive suits. In the end we watch as le Stéphanois, bleeding out from a gunshot wound, drives like a madman through Paris to reunite a kidnapped Tonio with his mother. He clings to the steering wheel in a death grip, his face colorless, his head nodding as he stares up at the clawing branches of bare trees, the scudding clouds where not so long before a little boy’s balloon sailed up and up and out of sight. Hold tight. You see what can happen?