Le Samouraï (1967)

     “What is friendship? It’s telephoning a friend at night to say, ‘Be a pal, get your gun, and come on over quickly.’ “

Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville.

In the ACMI theatre the screen announced that we were about to see a film, that is, non-digital.  Fair warning, because the image that appeared was flecked with scratches, not quite crisp and accompanied by a softly buzzing soundtrack. It took me back fifty years to when the Melbourne Uni Film Society ran movies like Underworld USA, Breathless and Johnny Guitar, and each print bore the marks of travel through many projectors. At one such screening I saw Le Doulos, and that was my introduction to Melville.

From this distance, having become familiar with his oeuvre, I place him amongst the greatest French directors. His career stands between, and overlaps classical French Cinema and the New Wave.  On the one hand, and a little arbitrarily, I place him with Renoir, Ophüls and Becker, but not with those denounced by Truffaut in “A certain tendency of French Cinema“; on the other, he was enthusiastically embraced by Godard and Truffaut as a major influence.  He became a director without ever having worked in the industry, nor through film criticism like the Cahiers directors of the New Wave.

He was given his first camera at the age of six, in 1924, and made his own movies until he joined the Resistance in 1940. Demobbed, he decided to become a director but found himself blocked from entering the industry, so he set up his own little studio, the equivalent of forming a garage band. His first film was also the first for cinematographer Henri Decaë, who went on to make many films with Melville as well as becoming the go-to cinematographer of the New Wave. His first feature was Le Silence de la Mer (1947), a film about the German Occupation, a theme to which he returned twice more, but he is best-known for a string of policiers beginning with Le Doulos in 1962 and ending with his last film, Un Flic (1972).  Roger Ebert called his gangster movies “the chamber music of crime”.  They are true genre films, deep noir, highly stylised and antirealist, and Le Samouraï is the pick of the bunch. Beginning with his time in the Resistance, Melville gained a familiarity with the milieu, the criminal underground which is the setting of his tales of loyalty and betrayal.

Jef Costello (Alain Delon) is a hit-man. He has no back story, no explanation, and we first meet him lying fully clothed on the bed of his dark, bare room, smoking, while a bullfinch in a cage chirps intermittently.

In a lengthy, almost dialogue-free sequence, we see him go through a meticulously organised preparation for an assassination, culminating in his entry to a nightclub, Martey’s, through which he passes unobserved to a back room, the manager’s office; the manager asks him what he wants and he replies, “To kill you.” Leaving, he comes face-to-face with the nightclub’s pianist, Valérie (Cathy Rosier). After a pause, he walks past her and leaves the club.

To this moment, he has only had contact with two people who are clearly part of his regular preparation – a suburban mechanic who changes the plates on his stolen Citroën (he always steals Citroëns) and provides him with a pistol, and a woman, Jane (Nathalie Delon), who may or may not be his lover, it’s quite uncertain, but whose task is to provide him with an alibi. The encounter with the pianist is unplanned, but manageable – he has only to shoot her.  Mysteriously, enigmatically, he does not.

Reflect for a moment on Jef’s life. He kills for money, but he lives such a spartan life that money is clearly not an end in itself; money is merely punctuation, and payment marks the end of the ritual of the hit. He lives in solitude, silent and impassive.  The only hint of an inner life is in his careful attention to his appearance; an elegant trench coat, a fedora adjusted just so, and white cotton gloves donned just before he kills. Melville describes him as a schizophrenic, and perhaps his madness lies in the paring down of his life to an archetypal form.

When, in the midst of his work, he is suddenly confronted with a beautiful female musician, the shock of their meeting derives from a mutual recognition – a pure force of destruction meeting a pure force of creation. Subsequently, he is picked up in a police sweep and when the Superintendent (Francois Périer) puts him in a lineup, Valérie refuses to recognise him. He accepts this phlegmatically, but in fact he is perturbed and intrigued. Why did she not betray him? Loyalty and betrayal now become central to the narrative. The Superintendent is convinced of his guilt and in the only long dialogue scene in the film he tries to persuade Jane to withdraw her alibi; she turns him down flat. The police attempt to bug his room, unsuccessfully, and an elaborate, highly co-ordinated attempt to shadow him through the Métro also fails. The gang who ordered the hit are worried by the police attention, and at a meeting where Jef is to be paid he is shot instead and, wounded, barely escapes with his life.

As is the way in noir thrillers, the narrative speeds up in the final act. The gang amongst whom we recognise the Martey’s barman, decide to give Jef another contract.  He takes it, but later kills the gang leader. He goes through his usual preparations, but everything seems slightly awry; he goes to Martey’s, and this time he makes sure he is seen:

“Pourquoi, Jef?”

“On m’a payé pour ca.”

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To me, this is a masterpiece. Delon’s mask-like beauty is riveting but hermetic – nothing is revealed except through action.  The production design and cinematography reveal a shadowy world drained of colour, Jef’s mental milieu.  Jef’s human relationships – the mechanic and Jane – are essentially instrumental; his closest companion is a caged bird. Lightning strikes in a dingy hallway, and he is undone.

The film was successful in France but was scarcely marketed abroad.  Retitled, desperately and pathetically, as The Godson it was released in the USA in 1997 and made only $40,000.  It is highly regarded by film critics (100% on Rotten Tomatoes) and filmmakers, and it was a direct influence on films like Drive (Nicholas Winding Hrefn), The Killer (John Woo) and Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch), good films by good directors, but never approaching Melville’s beautiful, spartan simplicity.

 

 

                                                                         

Our Kind of Traitor (2016)

Directed by Susanna White.

Perry Makepiece (Ewan Macgregor) and Gail Perkins (Naomie Harris) are on a romantic holiday in Marrakech.  When we meet them they are in bed, but evidently not all that much in love.  Later, at dinner they argue and Gail storms out, after which  Perry is approached by a man who has been part of rowdy group at the restaurant.  The man, Dima (Stellan Skarsgard), introduces Perry to his sinister-looking friends and later takes him to a party – a Russian gangster party – and at another party takes him aside to make an offer:

So that’s the setup.  Russian gangsters, MI6, secret documents and an innocent abroad seduced into helping out.  Exactly what one might expect from an adaptation of Le Carré, and as in The Night Manager, a fairly straight but obsessive MI6 man becomes Perry’s contact, Hector (Damian Lewis).  It unfolds as a thriller rather than a spy drama, but there are familiar complications at MI6; Hector’s boss is Billy Whitlock (Mark Gatiss), a smooth Le Carré Etonian type who deprecates Hector’s excessive zeal but allows him to continue.  The secret money laundering documents implicate, among others, several bankers and a British cabinet minister with whom Hector has an unhappy history.  More information is required before the spooks will act, so Perry and the reluctant Gail are sent back to convey the message to Dima.

The wan Perry-Gail relationship is a weak sub-plot that carries little narrative weight.  The feuding couple who reconcile through shared peril is a stock theme whose variants have a long history, going back at least as far as Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange (1931), but here it is used only to add a little colour to two very dull but mechanically necessary characters.  Naomie Harris is not to blame, since the script offers her nothing, but Our Kind of Traitor is just another stage in Ewan Macgregor’s steady glide down from his brilliant debut in  Trainspotting (1996).  Damian Lewis is let off the leash when Hector denounces the money launderers to a committee meeting in MI6, pointing out the human cost of all this criminal activity.  It’s a classic Le Carré speech, full of moral indignation, and Hector’s colleagues respond with predictable disdain.

The story itself rolls along briskly, with plenty of well-constructed suspenseful scenes, and the temperature lifts whenever Stellan Skarsgard is on screen.  His Dima is a man desperately playing a chancy game, gambling on strangers and his own nerve in an attempt to save the lives of his family.  Despite White’s efficient direction, without him the dough would never have risen.

Anthony Dod Mantle’s glossy cinematography strikes a false note for me.  The clip above exemplifies it – shadows and side lighting, saturated colours – all basically expressionist devices that draw attention to themselves rather than meshing with the story.  Just another bit that doesn’t quite fit in one of the lesser of the many cinematic adaptations of Le Carré.