Le Samourai

Jean-Pierre Melville's masterpiece Le Samourai (1967) represents a bit of a moral conundrum for me: Melville borrows the samurai, or rather, his superficial qualities and iconic image, from Japanese culture, leaving behind much of the history and cultural mythos. Yet far from a superficial usage, Melville appropriates the image of the samurai for his own deeply psychological and fatalistic ends. While I personally feel uncomfortable with this kind of cultural theft in the name of film, I also admire the spartan scripting and meticulous execution of Le Samourai, which in itself is analogous to the life of a samurai.

Jef Costello (Alain Delon) is our titular samurai: in this case, a gun for hire rather than a sword. He's steely-eyed, laconic, and cool. And he has no qualms about a little crime if the price is right. He'd just as soon kill a man as steal a car, as long as there was some money in it. And he manages to get the drop on just about everyone; his draw is preternaturally quick. In short, Jef Costello is a career criminal. He's in it for the long haul; he gets the job done and he doesn't stop until he's finished. In fact, a viewer might draw eerie similarities between our samurai and the T-800 and T-1000 model terminators from The Terminator films. While Costello accepts money for hits, his motivation to kill is neither financial nor personal. He does not enjoy killing; rather, much like Martin Blank from Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), he doesn't know what else to do. Killing is simply what he does, no more, no less.

Much like actual samurai, Costello's trajectory is wholly driven by and towards death. After a botched hit and a close call with the law, Costello is a marked man. His employers want him dead, and the Parisian police want to pin the murder of a high-profile nightclub owner on him. If he can silence the leading witness to the murder, he'll walk free and clear. But tracking her down will prove difficult, as Jef weaves his way through Paris's streets and underground, staying barely one step ahead of the ever-tightening police net.

There are some who place Le Samourai in the French New Wave movement of cinema, but frankly, this seems a bit of a stretch. While it's true that Melville follows the New Wave conventions of on-location shooting, the use of natural lighting, and a bare minimum of editing, he completely eschews the New Wave extemporaneous aesthetic. While the dialogue and sets are sparse and minimalistic, the film is tightly controlled by Melville. There are no wasted words, no wasted cuts, no wasted film. Everything down to the color of Jef's apartment walls is laboriously crafted by Melville's hand. In this way, in this deliberateness, in this micromanagement of the film, Melville flies in the face of the major tenet of New Wave, which is a rejection of rigid narrative storylines as despotic art. If I were to settle upon a label for Le Samourai, it would have to be hard-boiled, that close cousin to noir: gritty, realistic, fatalistic, centered around themes and stories from both sides of the law.

In Le Samourai, the set and sound design serve to contrast Jef's apartment with the Paris streets and the police headquarters. The film opens on a lingering static shot of the interior of Jef's apartment. While the opening credits unfold, the audience's eyes wander over the interior, searching for the focus. It is a very long time before it's even apparent that there is someone in the room, on the bed. We register Jef's presence only by the languorous wafting of his cigarette smoke. He does not move. He is completely still. The peeling and ancient grey walls give the apartment a surreal quality. The decor is spartan: a bed, two wooden chairs, a birdcage dead center. The bird, Jef's only companion. In a strange twist of fate, the bird, Jean-Pierre Melville's pet, was the lone casualty of a fire that destroyed Melville's studio the same year in which Le Samourai was released.

Jef's silent and empty apartment is immediately contrasted to Paris: loud, bustling, busy, hectic. Later, the apartment is again contrasted with police headquarters: angular, antiseptic, technologically-advanced. It is these subtle touches that make the film come alive. Jef himself is held in comparison to the police Inspector (Francois Perier). While Jef is taciturn, the Inspector is gregarious, grand, emotive. But both are supernaturally determined men. Jef will stop at nothing to finish a job once it is started, and the Inspector will not rest until he's tracked Jef down. It's a little bit of a classic cat-and-mouse game.

Check this one out if you like a classic hard-boiled crime thriller, or just a great French film.

Storyline & plot: 7/10
Cinematography & effects: 7/10
Music & mood: 8/10
Performances: 8/10

The Reverend says: 8/10