The best tribute we can pay to a departed filmmaker is to watch or rewatch his films. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks, since I learned that Michel Deville is no longer with us. In the filmography of the French director who died on February 16, ‘Le dossier 51‘ is considered a pinnacle. Rightly so. It is an excellently made film, well written (adapting a novel by Gilles Perrault), professionally acted by a team of not so famous actors (which is an advantage) and very original in terms of cinematic techniques. The subject is very relevant even today. We could almost say it’s a dystopian film. Michel Deville depicted on screen a world in which individuals are under constant surveillance, many decades before terms like ‘parallel state’ or ‘surveillance society’ entered the political lexicon. Of course, technology has evolved, but it is precisely the details related to the ‘advanced’ tracking techniques of the ’70s that give the film an air of retro-anticipation. If it had been made today, ‘Le dossier 51‘ could have been nominated for the César Awards (and would be too good a film for the Academy Awards) without the need to change a single frame.
The theme was not completely new in the cinematic landscape of the 70s. Other filmmakers had already tackled it, the most famous example being Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 ‘The Conversation’ with Gene Hackman in the lead role. I do not hesitate to say that ‘Le dossier 51‘ is a film of the same caliber. The main character is a French diplomat named Dominique Auphal who is posted to the headquarters of an international organization based in Luxembourg. A secret and nameless organization tries to hire him and for this purpose builds around him a whole network of agents and a surveillance apparatus with the latest gadgets of conspiratorial techniques of those years. Auphal is given the code name 51, and his wife will be 52. The purpose of the whole action will be to find the weak points of his character or the shadows of his biography in such a way that ’51’ can be blackmailed and coerced into becoming an agent. No resource is spared and no scruples stand in the way of ‘services’. And whoever rummages finds something, even when it comes to the most honest and devoted diplomat.
‘Le dossier 51‘ is filmed in pseudo-documentary style. Watched today we can easily imagine that the archives of the mysterious secret service have been opened after almost half a century. Photographs, audio tapes and sequences filmed with a camouflaged camera are shown as pieces in the file. Around the middle of the film these are interspersed with sequences filmed from the perspective of the agents in charge of the pursuits and of those who interrogate the witnesses around Domique Auphal, his family and people from his past. The use of the ‘subjective camera’ technique (today called point-of-view / POV filming) was not entirely new, but Michel Deville used it extensively and integrated the scenes shot in this way with the other ‘documents’ in the file. The result is effective and expressive. We breathlessly follow the fate of the hero who appears mostly in photographs and tape recordings. Both the pursued and the pursuers – agents, informants and the all-powerful boss (‘Jupiter’) are designated by numbers or code names. In fact, the few scenes in which those overseeing the heroes’ destinies appear towards the end of the film are the weakest scenes. Faceless cops are the most effective and feared. The victims, the subjects of the surveillance, may be heroes in the film made 45 years ago, or it may be any of us today.