Movies: Le samouraï

Here, Melville (born Grumbach, but changed his name as a tribute to Herman Melville) had a comparatively large budget at his disposal, and used it to create a very polished and meticulously assembled movie that fits together like one of those Asian boxwood puzzles. Everything locks into place so tightly that no nails, screws or glue are needed. Its camerawork — and especially its sound design — are so precise that aside from the props the movie looks like it could have been made yesterday. The plot is unspectacular, perhaps deliberately so (to keep from getting in the way, I suspect), but the way the story unspools and becomes surprisingly deep without even trying is unmatched.

The film stars Alain Delon as Jef Costello, a killer-for-hire in a role that has inspired countless imitations. He lives in a shabby one-room apartment where the only furnishings are what he needs to hold his clothes, his cigarettes, and his Evian. (Think of Besson's The Professional, with Jean Reno's similarly stoic character and his predilection for milk.) He dresses himself in a suit and tie, wraps himself in a raincoat, slides a fedora onto his head, and steps out into a dingy Paris morning. After stealing a car and having the plates switched by a mechanic, he obtains a gun, heads over to a nightclub, kills a man, and slips away. His girlfriend (if she can be said to be that) provides him with an alibi, as does a total stranger.

Costello barely speaks once during the first fifteen to twenty minutes of the movie, and during the whole of the film he has maybe a few dozen lines of dialogue total. Delon was an astoundingly good-looking actor, and he plays Costello as if this face of his was nothing more than a mask that he was wearing for a while. He never smiles (or frowns, for that matter), never so much as flares his nostrils, not even when someone tries to shoot him point-blank in the stomach. Instead of making him seem remote and uninteresting, though, it has the exact opposite effect. What makes him tick? The film's answer seems to be that there isn't anything that makes him tick, per se: he is, quite simply, all of a piece.

Shortly after the murder the police round up dozens of men matching Costello's general description, including Jef himself. The one person who can most directly identify him, the piano player (Cathy Rosier) looks at him in the lineup and insists it cannot be him. Why? Later, she meets him again, and there is a tentative conversation that hints at her being subtly fascinated with him, in a Hitchcockian way. Dangerous things command our attention, and he with his poker face and his unchanging eyes is doubly attention-getting.

Costello's behavior outside of his job is equally enigmatic. He has a lover, Jane (Alain's real-life wife Nathalie Delon), but Jane also has another man who mostly seems content to supply her with gifts. What, if anything, does he think of this situation? Costello seems to treat Jane as an obligation, so people won't question if he's even human or not. Perhaps he's attracted to her because she clearly has real spine. When the police superintendent comes into her apartment and tries to blackmail her, she refuses more because she hates having her nose rubbed in her own dirt than anything else:

Superintendant: Don't you love him?
Jane Lagrange: No.
Superintendant: Really? I'd have said you did. Laying yourself on the line for him like that, I thought you must love him.
Jane Lagrange: You're not the psychologist you imagined.

One of the ways the film is such a work of genius is how it shows people's minds at work but doesn't force conclusions. At one point the police sneak into Costello's apartment, plant a bug, and then set up shop across the street to listen in. The only thing they hear is the feeble chirp of Costello's pet bird, and the bird's behavior signals to Costello that something may be wrong. The very presence of the bird in his life is odd; does he own it so that he can know if someone's broken into his room? Because the movie supplies us with many hints about these things but no one interpretation, it becomes fascinating instead of closed-ended.

Melville finds many subtle ways to link Costello with his pursuers. At more than one point he produces a massive keyring and goes systematically through each key until he finds one that will start the car he has chosen to steal. Similarly, when the police come to break into his apartment, they produce a set of master keys and begin trying them all. When he is decked out in his garb, he could almost pass for a detective himself. One of the film's great ironies is that his own compatriots, who have chosen to sell him out, are a greater threat to him than the cops.

The latter half of the film features a chase through the Paris Metro, but it's not a high-energy chase like the one in Diva. It depends more on strategy and cunning, as when Costello makes a mad leap out of a train car to fake out one of his police tails. Like many other scenes in the movie, it ends not with catharsis, but with a further ratcheting up of the tension. Everything pays off in the very last scene, however, where Costello returns to the club one last time. The best moments here are little ones, as when the bartender sees Jef putting on his gloves (as he does before committing a murder) and slowly ... backs ... away. And then there's the conclusion, where we realize just how closed-ended everything really has been.

Melville loved American movies and film noir conventions, and invested almost all of his movies with many examples of his affection. In Bob le flambeur, the hero drank Coca-Cola and drove an American car; here, he seems to be drawing more on the laconic self-reliance shown by so many of the detectives, gangsters and hitmen of the Thirties and Forties. His characters aren't big, colorful types, but embodiments of specific attitudes, and the drama comes naturally from the way they collide.

What of the title? One of the things that has been said about the samurai ethic is how it embodies for the Japanese a cultural tendency to adhere masochistically to a credo or a mission. If you promise something, you pay with your life if you don't deliver. That idea comes very much to the fore in the film's last moments, when we realize — for the first and last time — what Costello was thinking.