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His solitude is matched only by that of the tiger in the jungle, according to a bit of counterfeit bushido. The aesthetic of ashen quietism is announced at once with a tableau behind the credits, bed and smoke and caged bird in a dingy room, it might be a Diebenkorn interior and has intense consequences for Bertolucci's Il Conformista. The hired assassin (Alain Delon) is modeled after Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire, behind a rain-speckled windshield he's an abstraction of fedora, trenchcoat and cigarette. "Who are you?" "Doesn't matter." "What do you want?" "To kill you." The assignment is prepared with a "two-part alibi," half with a prostitute (Nathalie Delon) and half with an after-hours poker circle, the witness is a nightclub pianist (Cathy Rosier). (She dons leopard-print coats and is glimpsed later at home in a black silk kimono.) Double-cross at the overpass, games with the superintendent (François Périer). "I never lose." The Jean-Pierre Melville cosmos polished beyond all eeriness, a work of famous perfections. The terrible purity of anonymity, the rituals and mannerisms of cool, the masks everybody wears. A leaden silence, pierced by bullets or a chirping bullfinch. The law and the underworld each has its own set of keys, a match cut turns the gangster's hideout and the police station into the same room (cf. Lang's The Big Heat). "One might say the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime." A blinking light on a city map for the methodical chase, between White Heat and The French Connection. The beautiful style that suffocates, quite droll, understood by Melville as he steers his metallic mannequin toward a stunning harakiri. The empty hand suddenly has a pistol, the loaded pistol suddenly is empty. "Dernière fois..." Mann, Hill, Kitano, Jarmusch, Woo and Tarantino have all done extensive work on this. Cinematography by Henri Decaë. With Michel Boisrond, Jean-Pierre Posier, Catherine Jourdan, and Robert Favart.
--- Fernando F. Croce |