Melville. Delon. “Cool.”
Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai is a beast of a film - the type whose influence is felt for decades thereafter. So this week we'll be taking a look at the seminal film, as well as the films it inspired and itself took inspiration from.
Although not directly belonging the French New Wave, much of the movement owes a clear debt to Jean-Pierre Melville. After serving as part of the French Resistance during WWII, Melville tried to make it in the film industry. Receiving nothing but the door from everyone in town, Melville blazed his own path, becoming an independent filmmaker and eventually founding his own studio. Melville shot on location with often miniscule budgets, aiming for a higher degree of realism than what was previously seen in French cinema - serving as inspiration for later luminaries like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. Also, much like the New Wave, there was an intense, almost all-consuming love of classic Hollywood cinema - especially the gangster films of the thirties and forties. But unlike the anarchic glee Godard or Truffaut found in tearing down the established rules of cinema, Melville embraced the classicism; emulating the films he admired every bit as much as he elaborated upon them.
Le Samourai is one such love letter to classic film noir, embracing the style and affectations of those older films so closely it could almost be read as parody. Melville and his star Alain Delon gave us an antihero who would be emulated for decades in films of its ilk - the perfect crystallization of the detached, lone wolf killer-for-hire. The story is the simplest of crime/noir plots: Delon plays Jef Costello, a professional killer so precise in his method it becomes almost a ritual. For the first half-hour we follow Jef as he prepares for his evening’s target. He puts on his coat and hat with pinpoint precision before leaving his apartment, and promptly steals a swanky car by using a set of dozens of keys he carries with him. From there he takes his newly stolen car to a secret mechanic, who changes the license plates and provides Jef with a gun. From there he stops by his girlfriend’s place and backroom poker game to provide the perfect alibi, before sneaking off to the nightclub where his target awaits. The rest of the night goes smoothly as Jef carries out the hit, but of course one detail slips through his fingers: the piano player at the club sees him right after he’s killed his man. That one slip-up causes Jef no short amount of trouble, as he spends the rest of the run-time dodging both the cops and his criminal employers looking to tie up loose ends.
Much like Jef himself, Melville carries out his film with superb craft and attention to detail - showing the same clockwork precision Jef does when straightening his hat perfectly across his brow. Melville favors tension over action, so much of the film is played out through stillness and long stretches without dialogue. Also like Jef, Melville remains detached emotionally - keeping his camera pushed back and his takes long, the director doesn’t allow us to get to close to any of the characters; especially Jef, who through the unfettered and minimalist direction we begin to see the world as he does - a spectator, observant of the tiniest of details and yet always at a distance.
As Jef himself, Alain Delon sets up the framework of a character that we would see time and again throughout crime/noir films: the emotionally-dead male killer so shut off and isolated from the world he appears “cool.” Melville was drawing heavily from older Hollywood noirs, and Jef’s meticulous outfit* is virtually the same as Alan Ladd’s from This Gun for Hire. Both films are similar in that they deal with aloof killers breaking their own code and letting someone (usually a woman) get too close. But where Melville differed was his interest in the deeper psychological underpinnings of such a character. Melville and Delon realize that such a man would have to be rather unsettled, and set out to portray Jef as a highly-functional schizophrenic. His psychosis is what allows him to be so good at his job, and that self-assuredness gets mistaken for some kind of zen-like “coolness,” when in fact there is something deeply wrong with the man. He has a beautiful girlfriend (played by Delon’s then-wife Nathalie Delon), or at least we assume it’s his girlfriend; little more than longing stares pass between them. In spite of Delon’s almost magnetic sexual presence, Jef seems almost asexual - he’s aloof with his girlfriend, and he blatantly ignores a pretty girl who smiles at him early on in the film. The only woman who manages to catch Jef’s eye is the nightclub pianist Valerie (played by Cathy Rosier), who saw him leave the scene of the crime… which of course is the catalyst for his downfall. The pianist is an enigma throughout - she has the opportunity turn Jef into the police, yet doesn’t. There are hints that she’s connected to Jef’s employers, but a clear picture is never fully painted. But Jef’s attraction to her is clear - she is the symbol of Death, and being the samurai of the title, Jef is immediately drawn to her.
A quote from the Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai tells us that a samurai should “every day, without fail…consider himself as dead.” From the moment we first meet Jef Costello in his cramped apartment, he’s already dead. It’s why he’s a killer, and it’s also why he’s drawn to Valerie - Jef nihilistically seeks out his own demise to find release from a world that has no place for men who follow such a strict code.
It’s odd that Melville and Delon’s intended deconstruction of the cool tough guy as inherently broken instead became the template that future filmmakers would follow in creating their own romantic antiheroes. But when you look as cool as Alain Delon does in a hat and trench coat, how can you blame them?
*It’s also worth noting that Jef dies at the end while not wearing his hat - further reinforcing the importance of surface details in Jef’s life.
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