Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: “When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever the diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle.”
Jean-Pierre Melville made up that Buddha which quote opens his Le cercle rouge and I am feeling it. My red circle with this film is a wide one, reaching way back to the first time I heard about it on an episode of Filmspotting from 2008 (to give you a better sense of time, it was the one where Adam and Matty reviewed Pineapple Express). That was part of their Classic Heist marathon, which I am still woefully ignorant of, but in theory very interested in consuming. Don’t believe me? That’s fair, but it motivated two draft picks in the very first Criterion Month. Those were Rififi, which directly inspired Le cercle rouge, and another Jean-Pierre Melville film, Le Samouraï. And it keeps going: Le Samouraï was indirectly remade in a couple more of my later picks, The Killer and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. So this really does feel like a homecoming.
