Jean-Pierre Melville - Le Samouraï (1967)

In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology—maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece Le Samouraï defines cool.



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.






Subtitles at: http://www.allsubs.org/subtitulos/busqueda-subtitulos/Samoura%C3%AF++/10