Le Samourai (1967)
directed by Jean Pierre Melville
It takes a man with a great deal of self-confidence and a true sense of his own vision to invent a line from the book of Bushido and then use it as an ethos for his film. Jean Pierre Melville is such a man. At the outset of the 1967 hitman tone poem that is Le Samourai, Melville does just that. The entire opening credits sequence is a static shot of a dilapidated apartment that contains seemingly nothing. It's a simple shot of a man lying on a bed smoking in the dark. The room is cold and dank. There is no score playing. Rain can be heard through the slightly opened window. Cars drive by in the rain and their shadows bounce off the ceiling while a lonely bird flutters in a cage set upon a table just left center-screen. After the credits are finished, a proverb appears in the lower right hand corner:
"There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it be that of the tiger in the jungle ... perhaps ... - The book of Bushido (Book of the Samurai)."
The line is a ruse. Melville simply conjured the line as an umbrella for the film's primary theme. Nowhere in the Book of Bushido does this proverb actually appear. Yet, it is with this sort of mind game trickery that Melville begins his hard boiled opus. And that is all the more to prove his point . . . perhaps.
The idea of killing simply for money is antithetical altogether with the code of the Samurai, who kills for his honor and with ethical conviction, but our anti-hero in Le Samourai is a paid assassin and he's a very good one. While there is no way to know if Melville was aware of the contradiction between his main character and the actual philosophy of the traditional Samurai, in Melville's hands everything seems like a stylized mash-up as only he could see it. In this way, the false Bushido proverb resonates almost more than if it had been real to begin with.
Our Samurai, Jef Costello is played flawlessly by Alain Delon. At first blush Delon looks all wrong for Costello. He's dashing, quiet and confident. For all the reasons that Robert Mitchum or Yves Montand or Humphrey Bogart could pull off a role like this, Delon seems to be miscast. And yet, because he looks so terrific he is forced to overcompensate with a stoicism, a lack of true expression and a detachment that translates perfectly to Melville's theme of solitutde and duty. This approach also allows for Costello to become an almost voyeur of his own behavior bringing the viewer even closer to him in a co-dependent fashion.
Costello is hired to kill a club owner and the only reliable eyewitness to the crime is the club's pianist. Yet, when a harsh interrogation yields nothing from the eyewitness, Costello is left to wonder why he's let of the hook - though he never interprets the pianist's failure to finger him as a gesture of kindness. In essence, he plays the angles; curious as to what greater motivation would be the impetus to keep Jef on the streets.
Costello has manufactured a nearly air-tight alibi with the help of his sometime girlfriend, Jane (Nathalie Delon) Costello and is still doggedly pursued by a Police Superintendent (Francois Perier). It is in this duel of Costello vs. Cops that Melville's inner Kafka truly takes over and Le Samourai begins its transformation from simply a good crime film into something of a higher power. The extensive visual groundwork thus far laid - images of a bird trapped in a cage, the lonely apartment room and Costello's detachment from society - excavate a deeper well of existential dilemmas. Using the paid hitman as a foil, Melville explores the lonely concept of one man against the world and the futility of duty without a greater meaning.
In an interview for French TV in 1967 just prior to the film's release, Delon says that the film is about loneliness. While he's very much on the mark with that statement, it's also like saying Babe Ruth was very good baseball player. It's factually accurate, yet overly simplified. Melville's exercises in exploring the characters of loneliness are always so damned artful and sleek and beautifully rigid the depth of them is lost - on the surface at least. This is just one of the things that makes them truly great.
In a deceptively quiet and simple moment, Delon is dressing his arm after he's wounded in a scuffle. He methodically cleans the wound, drapes it in gauze and wraps an outer layer of tape and dressing over the bandaged area. He does not panic, though he is certainly emotionally affected. He does not moan or wince though he is certainly in pain. The scene is like watching a tribesman walk over hot coals. The suffering is a part of the journey and there are lessons to be garnered within it. Moments like these are myriad in Le Samourai and they're easy to miss or undervalue. Melville is a master at creating so many of these moments that we are permitted to see beyond the window of the narrative arc even if it we don't fully realize it at the time.
There is an almost maniacal pathos in Melville's attention to detail as he creates an underworld that is largely a nod to American film noirnoir elements with the stark designs of late 60's Europe and a knack for a timeless sense of slick fashion with a private eye bent. In short, it all looks utterly beautiful and dangerously erotic.
It's the beauty of the film and Delon's asexual power that allow the visual nature of LeSamourai to sneakily reinforce the overarching theme of the film, even if that theme is fabricated in Melville's own mind. Loneliness, of course, is not an unusual subject for the cinema, nor is the lone man crime thriller. However, in Melville's hands, this meta-mash-up of street crime, existential meaning, the loneliness of life and hyper-real set pieces comes off the screen as a genre all its own. Le Samourai is an obvious influence on filmmakers like John Woo, Quentin Tarantino and served as an enormous inspiration for Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way Of The Samurai. It's hard to create a new language within the gangster movie genre and Melville does so brilliantly. It seems even more impressive that he started just by inventing one little proverb for the Book of Bushido.
directed by Jean Pierre Melville
It takes a man with a great deal of self-confidence and a true sense of his own vision to invent a line from the book of Bushido and then use it as an ethos for his film. Jean Pierre Melville is such a man. At the outset of the 1967 hitman tone poem that is Le Samourai, Melville does just that. The entire opening credits sequence is a static shot of a dilapidated apartment that contains seemingly nothing. It's a simple shot of a man lying on a bed smoking in the dark. The room is cold and dank. There is no score playing. Rain can be heard through the slightly opened window. Cars drive by in the rain and their shadows bounce off the ceiling while a lonely bird flutters in a cage set upon a table just left center-screen. After the credits are finished, a proverb appears in the lower right hand corner:
"There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it be that of the tiger in the jungle ... perhaps ... - The book of Bushido (Book of the Samurai)."
The line is a ruse. Melville simply conjured the line as an umbrella for the film's primary theme. Nowhere in the Book of Bushido does this proverb actually appear. Yet, it is with this sort of mind game trickery that Melville begins his hard boiled opus. And that is all the more to prove his point . . . perhaps.
The idea of killing simply for money is antithetical altogether with the code of the Samurai, who kills for his honor and with ethical conviction, but our anti-hero in Le Samourai is a paid assassin and he's a very good one. While there is no way to know if Melville was aware of the contradiction between his main character and the actual philosophy of the traditional Samurai, in Melville's hands everything seems like a stylized mash-up as only he could see it. In this way, the false Bushido proverb resonates almost more than if it had been real to begin with.
Our Samurai, Jef Costello is played flawlessly by Alain Delon. At first blush Delon looks all wrong for Costello. He's dashing, quiet and confident. For all the reasons that Robert Mitchum or Yves Montand or Humphrey Bogart could pull off a role like this, Delon seems to be miscast. And yet, because he looks so terrific he is forced to overcompensate with a stoicism, a lack of true expression and a detachment that translates perfectly to Melville's theme of solitutde and duty. This approach also allows for Costello to become an almost voyeur of his own behavior bringing the viewer even closer to him in a co-dependent fashion.
Costello is hired to kill a club owner and the only reliable eyewitness to the crime is the club's pianist. Yet, when a harsh interrogation yields nothing from the eyewitness, Costello is left to wonder why he's let of the hook - though he never interprets the pianist's failure to finger him as a gesture of kindness. In essence, he plays the angles; curious as to what greater motivation would be the impetus to keep Jef on the streets.
Costello has manufactured a nearly air-tight alibi with the help of his sometime girlfriend, Jane (Nathalie Delon) Costello and is still doggedly pursued by a Police Superintendent (Francois Perier). It is in this duel of Costello vs. Cops that Melville's inner Kafka truly takes over and Le Samourai begins its transformation from simply a good crime film into something of a higher power. The extensive visual groundwork thus far laid - images of a bird trapped in a cage, the lonely apartment room and Costello's detachment from society - excavate a deeper well of existential dilemmas. Using the paid hitman as a foil, Melville explores the lonely concept of one man against the world and the futility of duty without a greater meaning.
In an interview for French TV in 1967 just prior to the film's release, Delon says that the film is about loneliness. While he's very much on the mark with that statement, it's also like saying Babe Ruth was very good baseball player. It's factually accurate, yet overly simplified. Melville's exercises in exploring the characters of loneliness are always so damned artful and sleek and beautifully rigid the depth of them is lost - on the surface at least. This is just one of the things that makes them truly great.
In a deceptively quiet and simple moment, Delon is dressing his arm after he's wounded in a scuffle. He methodically cleans the wound, drapes it in gauze and wraps an outer layer of tape and dressing over the bandaged area. He does not panic, though he is certainly emotionally affected. He does not moan or wince though he is certainly in pain. The scene is like watching a tribesman walk over hot coals. The suffering is a part of the journey and there are lessons to be garnered within it. Moments like these are myriad in Le Samourai and they're easy to miss or undervalue. Melville is a master at creating so many of these moments that we are permitted to see beyond the window of the narrative arc even if it we don't fully realize it at the time.
There is an almost maniacal pathos in Melville's attention to detail as he creates an underworld that is largely a nod to American film noirnoir elements with the stark designs of late 60's Europe and a knack for a timeless sense of slick fashion with a private eye bent. In short, it all looks utterly beautiful and dangerously erotic.
It's the beauty of the film and Delon's asexual power that allow the visual nature of LeSamourai to sneakily reinforce the overarching theme of the film, even if that theme is fabricated in Melville's own mind. Loneliness, of course, is not an unusual subject for the cinema, nor is the lone man crime thriller. However, in Melville's hands, this meta-mash-up of street crime, existential meaning, the loneliness of life and hyper-real set pieces comes off the screen as a genre all its own. Le Samourai is an obvious influence on filmmakers like John Woo, Quentin Tarantino and served as an enormous inspiration for Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way Of The Samurai. It's hard to create a new language within the gangster movie genre and Melville does so brilliantly. It seems even more impressive that he started just by inventing one little proverb for the Book of Bushido.
No comments:
Post a Comment