For many cinephiles, when we think about the French New Wave films, a few visual and thematic motifs come immediately to mind. Among these are nuns, cars and two-bit hustlers. These are just ideas and images with which the post-war generation of French filmmakers were obsessed, for whatever reason, and they generally play an outsized role in the movies of the era.
Though he would insistently disavow the film as a purely commercial exercise to get himself enough cash for creative independence, Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1953 film, When You Read This Letter, is full of nuns, cars and two-bit hustlers. The Riviera-set film—which never received a wide release in the United States and thereby gets hyped as the “unseen film” by Melville—features a complex love quadrangle centered on the scheming wishing-he-were-upwardly-mobile car mechanic Max Trivet (Philippe Lemaire). He strikes up a slow, patient relationship with a knowing married millionaire; a flirtatious, too-fast courtship of a naive teenaged orphan; and a more genuine obsession with the orphan’s stuffy older sister. This older sister, Thérése Voise (Juliette Gréco), is the film’s protagonist, not Trivet, who is more of a human plot device.
When the film begins, Thérése is a novice nun contemplating her new steps when she learns that her parents have both died in a car accident. She ultimately decides to leave the convent, at least temporarily, to tend to her carefree sister and run the family’s stationery shop in Cannes. This is where the two sisters get wrapped up in the schemes of the grifter Trivet, who dreams of getting his hands on some of the wealth of the married Irène Faugeret (Yvonne Sanson) before he inadvertently murders her by sabotaging her car. The Voise sisters are both infatuated with Trivet, but in very different ways. As the plot plays itself it, what the viewer gets is a soapy noir in the brilliant sunshine of the south of France, with narrative twists, backstabbing and some abrupt and unexpected violence.
While the director always distanced himself from When You Read This Letter and essentially argued that it did not really count as one of his films, any dedicated Melville watcher can clearly discern his various signatures. Beyond the nuns, cars and hustlers that both he and the rest of the French New Wave continued to build their films around, the most Melvillian touch is the Thérése character. Like so many of Melville’s future protagonists, she is strict, austere, reserved and maintains a near-unwavering fidelity to some personal code that she has fabricated to give her life meaning and herself some moral and philosophical grounding. The eponymous protagonist of Melville’s very next film, the breakout hit Bob le Flambeur, for instance, also hews to a consistent, self-created standard of behavior, for better and worse. These people who resolve the fundamental existential quandary of living a life of meaning in an existence that is obviously foundationally meaningless through a rigidly disciplined adherence to a self-fashioned morality are the typical (anti-)heroes throughout Melville’s oeuvre. Melville’s works all are philosophical, even though they often come across as hyper-masculine genre pieces; When You Read This Letter is much less masculine, but every bit as philosophy-laden as his other work. Regardless of what the late French master himself thought of it, this one is very much a Melville film and worth the time of any Melville fan, not just the completists.
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