Yes, truly, what kind of a man is this Jef Costello, this enigmatic cipher who bides his time in silent solitude, awaiting the auspicious moment to leave his sparse and dingy Parisian apartment and fulfill his contract to kill? What kind of a man is Le Samouraï, an impeccable icon of vintage postwar fedora and trenchcoat film noir style, impervious to the tie-dye and paisley whims of 1967, who rigorously maintains his impenetrable exterior surface, with barely a trace of detectable response as he carries out his grim duty to swiftly end lives that mean nothing to him? What kind of a man placidly shrugs off even the substantial financial payoff that initiates his application of lethal skill, that stirs up no visible response of satisfaction, no discernible flicker of any emotion - not even that of personal justice served, or old grievances somehow alleviated by the efficient annihilation of total strangers?
Jef Costello is an abstraction of an ancient masculine impulse - the urge to kill, without mercy, without apology, but with steely cold efficiency and a firmly suppressed yet ultimately indifferent hostility toward the relaxed, the comfortable, the powerful, the content. It's not a feeling borne of resentment, envy, bitterness or remorse for any particular set of circumstances from the past. There's no defined protest against the prevailing social order, nor is there any obvious demand for retribution lurking as a motivation for the assassinations that Jef has agreed to carry out in the course of his ordinary business, even though revenge of a sort eventually does factor into the story that Jean-Pierre Melville chose to tell in this signature work.
Le Samouraï is Melville's most stylistically refined and ruthlessly minimalistic masterpiece in a catalog of films spilling over with top rank stories of lonely men staggering into canyons of stark and isolated nihilism of the sort that inevitably draws more than a few innocent bystanders into their fatal vortex. Jef's drive to destruction is at a basic level thoroughly inexplicable in anything approaching rational terms, especially with the lack of any back story or explanatory factors to be found in this sharply whittled-down narrative. He's a harbinger of doom that has attached his narcissistic ego to a function that from all appearances is at one with the universal law of entropy itself. Aware of the inevitability of death and the ultimate disintegration of all that lives, Le Samouraï finds purpose in joining complicitly with that force, of self-consciously accelerating the process, taking an active participatory role, then moving on impassively to avoid the obstacles that would prevent him from repeating the act with the degree of masterful, disciplined control that Jef Costello has perfected.
More than most of the movies that I've covered in recent months, Le Samouraï is a film that generates a torrent of superlatives from critics and ordinary admirers caught up in its spell. The film stands distinctly apart from its peers of the latter half of the 1960s on account of its explicit temporal dislocation from the contemporary trends and concerns of the surrounding culture. There are no political allusions to speak of, no sense of disquiet concerning wars hot or cold, the sexual revolution, economic upheavals or any other shifts in values going on at the time. The roles of men and women, the functions of money and greed and power and honor, and the fundamental unbridgeable distance that stands between any two people, and most painfully in particular those who have shared moments of intimate love, or even sense its possibility in a yet-to-be-explored future - in this subdued, small-scale urban street bound epic, all those primeval forces work upon the fragile human psyche with as much elemental power as they always have, regardless of however many cops were gathered or however many hippies and radicals might be marching in the streets outside the theaters where the film was playing.
Melville's crystalline focus lends itself to a sustained effort to strip away all the excess possible to rivet our attention on a figure at once mysteriously distant yet so magnetically compelling, to the point that it's practically impossible for many of us to not find some point of identification with this cold-hearted killer, lacking in the most common attributes of conscience. Jef Costello is impossibly, breathtakingly handsome, poised to a degree impossible to not notice in a crowd, gifted with physical attributes that make him the envy of many. And yet, with this undeniable charisma, there's something tragic about the character, a morose brokenness that somehow led to him winding up in this dilemma where, after committing the murderous act that his destiny seems to have compelled him to, he must now rely on the thoroughly unpredictable mercy of strangers to help him dodge the punishment that he appears to have eluded so cleanly in who knows how many hit jobs he's pulled off in his shadowy past.
Has Costello been on the watch list of the unnamed superintendent assigned to investigate this latest murder of a prominent owner of a swanky jazz nightclub in central Paris? Did he understand the weight of the odds stacked against him in making a clean getaway on this particular night? On a first or even second viewing, one gets the sense that he's employing his uncanny instincts to slip through the ever-tightening dragnet that the detective has laid out to catch the killer, and the suspense created by Jef's evasions and the unswerving pursuit of h is adversaries generates a strong adrenaline rush indeed.
But closer attention to Jef's small gestures gets me wondering just how determined he was to escape detection altogether. Take note of the way in which he comports himself in setting up his precisely airtight (and therefore suspicious) alibis before the crime, and even more significantly, what items he chooses to take along with him afterward when he's picked up (as he apparently expected to be) at the post-killing poker game. To me, there's an unambiguous intention on his part to precisely replicate his appearance as he made his way to the nightclub's exit after pulling the trigger, even though that evidence could have been disposed of just as easily as the white gloves and murder weapon that he tossed off the bridge. Or even just left behind as he made his way into custody after stepping away from the card table.
No, after thinking it through a bit, I can't help but draw the conclusion that what we see taking place in this film is an elaborate ritual, primarily on Melville's part in scripting and shooting the tale the way that he did, but also by Jef, a man who has dedicated his prodigious talents to the cause of negation and impartial service to an order that is defined at the end of the day by its propensity for betrayal and petty hypocrisy. Jef's alliance with the darker aspects of human nature has presumably provided him a substantial degree of material prestige and sustenance, the adoration of at least one beautiful woman (to whom he doesn't seem capable of remaining faithful or lowering his guard) and at least for a time, a fleeting sense of purpose. But that charade has now exhausted itself, and he's left contemplating the shell of his own persona, more than ready to end the game, but only at a time and place, and with a witness, the kind, soulful and compassionate pianist Valerie, of his own choosing. To the last a master of his own fate, a rigorous disciple of his bushido code, after all other options have been eliminated and with implacable resolve, Le Samouraï commits Le Seppoukou.
Next: The Two of Us
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