My Favorite Jean-Pierre Melville Film

Jean-Pierre Melville's work was an important precursor to the French New Wave, with his love of film noir and his coolly stylish sensibilities. Heavily influenced by American gangster pictures of the 1930s and 1940s, he became France's greatest director of hard-boiled crime dramas. He was even known to dress the part, often seen in raincoats, a Stetson, and obscuring dark glasses. In his early days he acquired a reputation for being a filmmaking maverick, working independent of the French studio system, preferring amateur actors, and using unorthodox filmmaking techniques, like using natural lighting and shooting on location.

Over time, however, as Melville found greater success and embraced larger budgets and mainstream acting talent, a strong sense of lyricism and stylization emerged in his work. Nowhere was this more apparent than with "Le Samouraï," one of Melville's later films. The opening scenes contain no dialogue, simply looking in on the apartment of the hero, Jef Costello, played by Alain Delon. He has an American name and a preoccupation with the Orient. You understand his psyche just by looking at his environs: minimalist, quiet, spare, and exact. The palette is all cool blues and grays. The delicate notes of a lilting main theme and chirps form his pet bird, however, make it clear that Costello is also very much in possession of a romantic soul, one hidden beneath a placid exterior and a long history of violent deeds. We soon learn that he works as a hit-man, executing his jobs with careful skill and precision, but his life unravels when he's betrayed by his employers.

Jef Costello is an extraordinary film character, a criminal employed by the underworld, and yet also a man of consummate professionalism. The image he presents to the world is perfect, never a stitch out of place nor a movement wasted. We first see him smoking in bed, not resting, but simply waiting. His handsome face barely expresses any emotion, and yet it's hard to take your eyes off him. Costello's actions speak for him, his detached demeanor and his coldly flippant exchanges of dialogue with other characters. It's fun to watch him play cat and mouse with the cops, including a vociferous police inspector who is as impassioned as Costello is aloof. The film follows its protagonist's lead, meticulously observing how he carries out his work, step by step. Later, the same care is taken in showing us how the cops set up surveillance and bug Costello's apartment.

The pacing is deliberate, but never slow. There's some violence, but far more tension, slowly escalating from scene to scene. And while the usual trappings of a gangster picture are all present and accounted for - the cops, the girlfriend, the chases, and the complicated double-crosses - the primary conflict is totally internal, playing out in Delon's silences and the ellipses of his performance. Perhaps the most shocking action he undertakes is the simple act of a man putting on a pair of gloves. Costello has a loyal girlfriend, Jane, played by Delon's wife Nathalie, but their connection appears to be tenuous - perhaps only convenient. It's his relationship with the elusive dark-skinned pianist, played by Cathy Rosier, that dominates the narrative. She evokes all his guilt and compassion, perhaps representing another outsider he feels kinship for, or simply a line that his personal code will not allow to be crossed.

The original ending of the film had Costello finally show emotion, but Melville nixed it because Delon had previously made a film with a similar resolution. I'm glad that he did, because so much of the power of Jef Costello is the ambiguity of his nature and the mystery of his motives. Only an opening quote from a fictional Book of Bushido hints at his internal philosophy and state of mind. Over the years, "Le Samouraï" has influenced a fair number of imitators and homages, and they've almost all made the mistake of making their heroes more relatable to the audience, and their reasons for their actions more explicit. Jef Costello, however, remains one of cinema's most intriguing enigmas.

So Melville's gangster films were love letters to American cinema, but only up to a point. In reflecting their director's spiritual and poetic aims, I find most of them very French films. And still wonderfully vital ones at that.

What I've Seen - Jean-Pierre Melville

Les Enfants Terribles (1950)
Bob le Flambeur (1956)
Léon Morin, Priest (1961)
Le Doulos (1963)
Le Deuxième Souffle (1966)
Le Samouraï (1967)
Army of Shadows (1969)
Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

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