http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/391-le-samourai-death-in-white-gloves
Le Samouraï: Death in White Gloves
By David Thomson
Tone and style are everything with Le samouraï. Poised on
the brink of absurdity, or a kind of attitudinizing male arrogance,
Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with that macho extremism and
slips over into dream and poetry just as we grow most alarmed. So the
implacably grave coolness of Alain Delon’s Jef Costello is audaciously
mannered, as he puts on white gloves for a killing and announces that
for him “principle” is merely “habit.” (The film deserves one moment,
one shot, of him alone in his room, when the impassive noirist suddenly
collapses in unexplained laughter.) Whereas, as we see him stretched out
on his bed, the source of a silent spiral of cigarette smoke, like a
patient, tidy corpse-in-waiting, he is not just Delon, or some
against-type Costello minus Abbott. He is the distilled essence of
cinema’s solitary guns for hire, suspended between the somnambulant calm
of Lee Marvin in Point Blank and the self-destructive dedication that guides Robert Bresson’s priest in Diary of a Country Priest.
And
in that strange juxtaposition you have so much of Melville: the French
Jew who changed his real name (Grumbach) to that of the New England
author; the defiantly lone operator in postwar French cinema (for years,
Melville had his own studio, which burned down during the shooting of Le samouraï;
did all that cool inspire heat?); the assiduous admirer and imitator of
American tropes; and the tough guy who could appreciate Jean Cocteau
and Bresson as easily as he could Dashiell Hammett and Django Reinhardt.
You can imagine Melville’s rapture (a spiritual condition, not just
professional satisfaction) when he outlined the story to Delon, only to
be interrupted by the actor after ten minutes with, “This story has no
dialogue so far—I will do it.” And then, finally, in mute recognition of
kindred feelings of honor, Delon revealed his own room to Melville,
with a samurai sword as its only piece of decor and its omen of fate.
It has always been a vital French tradition to film the commonplace, the clouded ordinariness of the banlieue,
and make it poetic; this is a motif that reaches from Louis Feuillade
and Jean Vigo, through Marcel Carné and Cocteau, to Mel-ville, Georges
Franju, and Jean-Luc Godard. It is the atmospheric that lets us know we
are in a city very like Paris, but in the mindscape of dream, too.
Consider the auto shop where Jef has new plates put on his stolen cars:
it is a twilit alley on the edge of town, where clouds gather in the
desolate sky, dogs bark, and the mechanic never speaks.
That stealthy treatment of place was evident in Melville’s early films—in Le silence de la mer as well as in the greatest Cocteau film ever made, Les enfants terribles (directed by Melville from Cocteau’s novel and screenplay). It is there in Bob le flambeur (such a threshold to the new wave) and, of course, it is there in Le samouraï,
a film in which Henri Decaë’s elegant color scheme is obsessed with
gray, white, and black, the hues of classic still photography. And
stillness is everything in this film, just as its hero wants to be a
pool untouched by ripple or tremor.
As Melville himself said,
when asked to explain the curious detachment of his films and his
minimal attempt to fabricate decor or underline the photography: “I
don’t want to situate my heroes in time; I don’t want the action of a
film to be recognizable as something that happens in 1968. That’s why in
Le samouraï, for example, the women aren’t wearing miniskirts,
while the men are wearing hats—something, unfortunately, that no one
does anymore. I’m not interested in realism. All my films hinge on the
fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is first and foremost a
dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact
re-creation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me: I
move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.”
And sometimes that ease is problematic: some true admirers of Melville’s (like Bertrand Tavernier) complained that Le samouraï
was nearly comically removed from French realities. “Why not?” Melville
might ask, when that freedom allows us time to sink into the dream and
absorb the many divergent ideas that exist in the simple claim: “Alain
Delon is Jef Costello in Le samouraï.”
Take Delon first:
the enigmatic angel of French film, only thirty-two in 1967, and nearly
feminine. Yet so earnest and immaculate as to be thought lethal or
potent. He was also close by then to the real French underworld: it was
in the years right after Le samouraï that Delon and his ex-wife,
Nathalie (his uncertain lover in the film, but looking like a sister),
were caught up in real-life scandals of association with criminal
circles. (And don’t forget that when Le samouraï was released in the U.S., after the sensation of The Godfather, in 1972, it was retitled The Godson!)
Delon is not so much a good actor as an astonishing presence—no wonder
he was so thrilled to realize that the thing Melville most required was
his willingness to be photographed. As for “Jef,” it is American but
bitten off and slightly futuristic; Jeff is also the name Robert Mitchum
bears in Out of the Past. As for “Costello,” it could certainly be a reference to Frank Costello, the actual mobster. And then there is samouraï,
a word that was far more novel and exotic in the 1960s, and a promise
of American modes being seen through a glass of Japanese ritual.
What
is a samurai? When he wears a fedora as crisp as glass and a pale
trench coat that could have been sculpted by Brancusi? He is doomed. He
is an icon out of his time. He is a hired killer, yet he is a last
emblem of honor in a shabby world of compromise. He is a man who
believes in tiny adjustments to the perfect shadow cast by the brim of
his hat, who exults in the flatness with which he can utter a line, and
who aspires to the last lovely funeral of brushes on a drummer’s cymbal.
His essence is in timing, gesture, and glance. And he is as close to
the eternal spirit of the poet as, say, Cocteau’s Orpheus.
I made the comparison earlier with John Boorman’s Point Blank
and Lee Marvin. And I think that it is important. Nearly forty years
after these two films were made, the crime film has gone through such
lurid flights of exaggeration and stylization, and has succumbed to such
terrible, unfelt violence, that they may seem nearly Etruscan or Greek
in their cultural provenance. And that is largely because the two
directors had such faith in the natural dreamscape of film, and such
reverence for the codes of honor or perseverance that could make a
criminal’s life seem heroic. Marvin, in Point Blank, and Delon, in Le samouraï,
are immense cinematic forces who are hardly there or credible in
literary or realistic terms. We may decide that both films are the last
dream of their central characters. But then consider how rich they are
in ambivalence and how much they say about our urge to experiment with
the “other” life—the life of crime—through dream and film.
The story line of Le samouraï
is intricate yet very simple, and quite predictable. Jef is doomed.
Like us, he wonders why the nightclub pianist (Cathy Rosier) does not
give him away, for she has seen him in the act. Does she love him? In a
way, yes, but she is also a kind of Death figure who has selected him as
Her next client. And She chose him earlier, as their two cars paused
together at a traffic light. That pianist is a throwback (black, but
wearing white; wearing black, but in a white chair) to the angel of
death (Maria Casarès) in Orpheus.
Yet in its acting out,
this “contract” ennobles and redeems Jef. It doesn’t matter that the
story is slight and unmotivated. The movie can be followed, over and
over again, like music, because its configurations are so mysterious, so
averse to everyday explanation. Everything is in the playing or the
enactment. Seen again now, Le samouraï looks like a film from an
earlier age, one made at a time when great films were necessary (and
regular), because they demonstrated and fulfilled the nature of the
medium. Now that the medium is in ruin or chaos, Le samouraï
looks as abstract, yet as beautiful and as endlessly worthy of study, as
the Giotto frescoes in the basilica in Assisi. That which seemed
fanciful has become an eternal and luminous lesson in how men behaved
when they believed behavior mattered.
