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August 09, 2006

Le Samouraï

Die Trying

By Andrew

Unemployed until just recently, I have spent a lot of my time lately perusing job listings. Career opportunities abound, most out of my league, but I notice that no where does anyone appear to be offering a life in crime.

The lack of career offerings in crime leads me to believe one of two things: either crime really doesn't pay like they say, or it's simply an entrepreneurial line of work for self-starters and go-getters.¹ As my man 50 Cent is wont to say, get rich or die trying.

The thought strikes me that this might be why the crime film is so quintessentially American — in this country, our criminals are capitalists. As Scarface explained, with a patriarchal addendum, "In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the woman."

Lately, I've also spent a good amount of time watching, rewatching, and wondering about Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 crime genre classic, Le Samouraï, a new favorite of mine. The film follows the last hit in the life of Jef Costello — a gravely handsome, stoic cigarette-smoking assassin who always creases the brim of his hat on his way out the door.

Jef is not unemployed; he kills people for a living. But Jef doesn't appear to be a capitalist, nor is he an American. Jean-Pierre Melville may have adopted the crime film, as well as his last name, from the Americans, but he's altered the motivations.² Jef's not after money, though it is certainly his excuse. He explains his hits with one-liners like "I was to be paid," and yet his apartment is decidedly drab. At a bar he pays for a drink he never touches. In only the second shot of the film, he ponders a roll of bills as if it has lost all meaning.

Perhaps that's because most meaning seems lost on Jef; money may not be what he's after, but what exactly he's after wants a mystery. The man may be impeccably dressed, but as we learn by the final reel, he is also impeccably forlorn. A master of evasion, if nothing else, Costello keeps everyone in his life at a distance, and his stone-cold demeanor betrays nothing of his emotions, let alone his reasons for doing what he does.

Melville too does little to hint at what Jef's motivations are, but he gives several clues — including the allure of a beautiful, equally mysterious pianist — that Jeff's profession is deadly, not due to its danger and courage, but rather its very coolness and lack of connection. Despite his self-control — the cool reason cultivated, it seems, in order to kill — Jef is caged all the same, much like the bird he keeps in his apartment.

Jef remains a mystery most of all to the police chief hot on his trail, and for most of the film, the chief seems Jef's perfect counterpart. Hardly quiet, the Superintendent freely expounds his philosophy on life without anyone's asking. Rather than operate on a need-to-know basis, he needs to know everything. As a prominent map of Paris in his office suggests, the Superintendent operates from outside the cage: he keeps a bird eye's view.

And yet the Superintendent's distance keeps him clueless, as Jef's stalwart sham alibi, Jane, explains.

Superintendant: Don't you love him?
Jane Lagrange: No.
Superintendant: Really? I'd have said you did. Laying yourself on the line for him like that, I thought you must love him.
Jane Lagrange: You're not the psychologist you imagined.

The Superintendent doesn't get it³, but he's not alone, bceause Melville refuses to extend the pleasure of understanding even to the viewer. Many interpretations of the film I have read rely heavily on the "Samourai" concept of the title, leading some to suppose that Jef's life strictly follows bushido, a code of honor.

But Jef's honor is wholly ambiguous no matter what your reading. Melville seems to have chosen the foreign motif in order to defy these very literal readings to further an exotic resonance and arouse more mystery. Indeed, the film opens with a quote that Melville credits to "The Book of Bushido," despite its having been his own invention: "There is not greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle...perhaps..."

To the viewer, Jef defies psychology, until… perhaps… he begins to undertake an investigation of his own. Arrested following a hit, his employers target him. Confused, Jef pursues the beautiful pianist, Valérie, an eye-witness who refused to identify Jef to the police.

Jef is drawn to the mystery of Valérie's motivations. Perhaps it is in her, another enigma, that he has met his match. Smiling only in performance, she too never betrays her emotions, no matter how many questions Jef asks; she only answers his questions with questions of her own.

The pace of the film ensures that "…perhaps…" resounds from every action taken by our protagonist. Under Melville's tight and spare direction, mere gestures can be taken to mime philosophies; hallways and city streets become uncertain fates. Melville's style was decidedly slow, drawing frequent comparisons to another renowned French filmmaker, Robert Bresson, whose influence Melville always denied.

Melville himself has influenced many. From Leon Lai's codependent killer in Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels, who likes his job because he doesn't have to make decisions; to Tom Cruise's campy people-hating Vincent in Collateral; to Quintin Tarantino's own camp tributes in Pulp Fiction and elsewhere; at last to John Woo's endless bombastic hymns to Melville in The Killer and elsewhere;⁴ take-offs on Melville, and Le Samouraï in particular, take on an almost spiritual force.

Perhaps Jef is like Jesus - albeit a killer Jesus (a killer christ, if you will).⁵ He doesn't get rich, get power, or the woman; he dies young and dies trying. Like Jesus, these qualities leave his life and Le Samouraï itself open for interpretation; and like Jesus, the devoted have filled the emptiness of the legacy he left behind with equal parts understated reverence and overwrought sound and fury.

I am sure I have missed many others, but of all the films listed above with Melville motifs, I'd argue Wong Kar-Wai strikes the truest chord. Fallen Angels suggests, as does Le Samouraï, that not all careers are lucrative, and that the self-possession afforded by urban anonymity ultimately runs a deficit. It is no spoiler to reveal that the protagonist in each ends up killed, because life, at last, lies in the details, in what we do - our own personal investigations - and killing only gets you so far. For Wong Chi-Ming of Fallen Angels, it's food; for Jef, it is a woman behind a piano - only neither hitman gets far enough to see their investigations through.

Jef dies trying, but he's still fucking dead; and when you live and die like Jef, there is no one to mourn you when you're gone.

NOTES:
¹ Leaving aside, for a moment, the likes of Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, who holds that what we call "crime" is mostly just a catch-all political term of the State (and for the record, I agree with him). See his A Suitable Amount of Crime.

² I don't know if this has anything to do with French criminals being any less capitalist (I doubt it), but their anarchists did innovate the get-away car....

³ I'd argue the State's vantage point never will, but that's too much ideology for this film, perhaps.

⁴ Woo is reportedly remaking Melville's 1970 Le Cercle Rouge.

⁵ Not to be confused with the self-proclaimed "worst Jesus slasher movie ever made," Polterchrist.

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