Jean-Pierre Melville, “Le Samouraï” (1967)
A beautiful and seductive film that spawned many imitators, of which some like John Woo’s “The Killer” also became cult flicks, “Le Samouraï” is a homage to American cinema and film noir in particular, while at the same time it deconstructs ideas about loyalty, living and loving your work, the pursuit of perfection in whatever you do and masculine power. Jef (Alain Delon) is an icy cool, boyish freelance hitman who lives by the code of bushido: he lives a spartan, minimalist life in a Paris apartment, carries out his jobs with zeal and efficiency and visits his girlfriend Jane (Nathalie Delon) if he needs an alibi. So far the police haven’t been able to pin anything on him. But there’s always a first time for everything: on one job, Jef shoots dead a night-club owner Martey and several witnesses including a pianist Valerie (Caty Rosier) see him as he leaves the premises. The police catch up with him and arrest him and although one man identifies him in the line-up, Valerie declares she has never seen him before. Jef is released from custody but his employers aren’t pleased that he was arrested. Jef discovers both they and the police are pursuing him. He is given a new job which he believes is a trap. Meanwhile the police inspector (François Périer) organises a swoop on the night-club where Valerie is playing, knowing that Jef will turn up to see her.
The plot is straightforward and easy to follow: it’s a cat-and-mouse game in which Jef is the mouse rather than the cat, and although he knows there’s no way out of the trap, he can either go down fighting or submit quietly. The choice he makes illustrates the film’s message about fate, the inevitability of death and how our actions determine who we are. This is a highly existentialist film and Jef, like the protagonist in Albert Camus’s “L’Étranger”, is an existentialist man. He only comes to life while killing people and everything in his world, from his pet bird to his girlfriend, is a necessary adjunct to his job of killing people: Jane is his necessary alibi and the bird lets him know if intruders have come to the apartment while he is away. Even his kitchen only stocks first aid items for gunshot wounds instead of crockery and cutlery. So good is Jef at his job that within moments of entering his bugged apartment, he quickly locates the bug, and later when he goes outside and catches the Metro, he deliberately switches trains and travels on different train routes to throw the police off his trail even though over 70 officers have been assigned to follow him and cover every train station in Paris! Even so, total dedication to one’s job and perfecting every action with the correct tools aren’t enough to prevent Jef from falling onto a pathway that takes him inexorably to death.
Filmed mostly on locations around Paris and its suburbs, the movie has a distinct look which curiously doesn’t look dated or even like a normal Paris: Paris here looks abstracted and distilled to something hyper-Paris in all scenes, even scenes in which Jef drives stolen Citroen cars to a mechanic to get the number plates switched. In this very stylised movie, visually stylised to the point of fetishism, men still wear fedora hats and trench-coats over their grey business suits, and women wear fashions almost out of Alfred Hitchcock / Tippi Hedren films, with mini-skirts, hot pants and Carnaby Street fashion evidently not part of this universe. The interiors of buildings are significant characters in their own right: Jane’s apartment is soft and feminine, Jef’s own digs are beyond spare in a way at once dilapidated, genteel and stylised, and Valerie’s home is artistically furnished way beyond what a pianist in a night-club can actually afford, which alerts audiences to the possibility that she’s employed by the same people who employ Jef. Possibly the most hilarious scenes are set in police headquarters which is a hotbed of bureaucratic super-efficiency.
The acting and dialogue are as minimal as the plot and the camera lovingly focusses on Delon’s sculpted glamour-boy features in close-ups at regular moments throughout the movie wherever the plot allows. Nathalie Delon (real-life wife at the time) and Rosier as the women who complicate Jef’s life as representatives of life and death receive almost as much attention from the camera whenever they appear.
Crunch-time comes when Jef must carry out his last job, knowing that he is walking straight into the trap and will be killed: the way he goes about preparing for the job, checking his gun, walking into the club and eyeing his prey, reveals whether he is still locked in his loyalty to the bushido code or recognises the absurdity of the life he has led and in so doing, rises above it. The original ending in which Jef is shown with a smile on his face would have been most appropriate but Melville threw it out after discovering Delon had made an earlier film with a similar ending. It’s still an enjoyably hokey philosophy film of sorts nevertheless.