YEAR: 1967

DIRECTOR: Jean-Pierre Melville

STARRING: Alain Delon

You almost don’t want to start speaking about Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï. There’s a fear that if you say much, or anything at all, it will somehow tarnish its simple elegance. I’ll whisper, then.

Melville’s real name is Grumbach. He adopted the pseudonym of Melville as a means of disguise during his involvement with the French Resistance. He claimed he used the name because Herman Mellville was his favourite author. Appreciating the stylish minimalism of his films, his admiration for Herman’s own baroque style is a puzzle.

But, in the case of Le Samouraï, if the literary Melville inspired the cinematic Melville in some particular way, I’m sure he did so by way of his genius short work ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’. Completely lost in the shadow of the gargantuan Moby Dick, it deserves to be read. I’ll come back to it.

At a basic level, Le Samouraï can be appreciated for its visual grace. At a further level, it’s a coveted contribution to the genre of the neo-noir. At a third level, it’s the best-dressed torchbearer of Nouvelle Vague’s existentialist flame.

The aesthetic brilliance of the film is appreciable from the outset, with one of the most beautiful extended takes in cinema history. Beautiful, but utterly simple. It’s a view of Jef Costello (Alain Delon) lying on his bed in a spartan bedroom smoking a cigarette. The only visible animation is the langorous plooming of smoke and the fretful movements of a small bird chirping in a cage. The camera slowly approaches and the music begins. I’ve never been to film school, but I imagine the opening three minutes of the film to be the only prescribed material for Cinematic Atmosphere 101.

Jef Costello is a solitary hitman. His tailoring is sharp, as is his execution of his profession. Ninja might be more accurate than Samurai, but we are supposed to assume that, in his asceticism, Costello is dedicated to an inviolable code. The code manifests as a criminal method: He kills with calm precision; he gets away; and he always has an alibi.

There’s no need to go deep into the machinations of the ensuing plot; it is timeless noir. Suffice it to say the cold simplicity of the hitman’s creed is complicated by a witness. Costello becomes a liability to his criminal employer, and so now he is hunted by both the police and the criminals he works for.

On this point, the film takes its metafictional pivot: Costello has always survived on the strength of his solitude but now, when he is truly alone, he is weak. He is no longer samurai but rōnin (a samurai with no master, a samurai gone rogue).  

Suddenly, the caged bird of the opening scene becomes an essential symbol. The bird lived a simple life, but it was trapped. When Costello returns to his apartment the police have broken into and bugged, he finds the bird has lost feathers. He’s been rattled.

The viewer should watch the rest of the film play out with its own noir grace. I’ll say that its car scenes are wonderful (the film clearly influenced the figure of the solitary getaway driver for hire in Walter Hill’s 1978 The Driver and Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 Drive) and the film endows the Citroën DS with a grace not its own.

A last note on style: the film’s minimalist mise en scène and restrained colour palette dress each scene with a suaveness to match Costello’s own sartorial refinement.

More importantly, though, the film’s direction is as sharp and precise as Delon’s own villainy. The hitman indulges no excess. Nor the director. Each shot, each camera movement, each cut, each line of dialogue—each aesthetic element of the film has its purpose.

And this begs the ultimate question, which is: what is Costello’s purpose? The entire film symbollically and aesthetically steeped in some implicit philosophy. The title suggests devotion to a code of honour. But surely this allusion to icon of the Japanese samurai must be read with some heavy dose of irony since Costello’s code entertains no prospect of subserviance or devotion. This protagonist no doubt embodies some quasi concept of honour in his ruthless adherence to principle, there is no principle in sight.

Enter Bartleby. Bartleby is one of Herman Melville’s most unnerving character inventions. The entire plot of the story revolves around Bartleby being hired as a scrivener, works diligently, and then at some point inexplicably starts responding to his employer’s instruction by softly declaring that he would ‘prefer not to’. Bartleby, like Costello, holds to this preference as though it were a spiritual dictum. He continues not to work until eventually his arrested and imprisoned for vagrancy. The story is narrated by Bartleby’s employer, who, though perplexed by him, shows concern for him. He visits him in prison and bribes one of its cooks to ensure Bartleby gets nourishment. Upon returning some days later, however, he finds that Bartleby has died of starvation. He is told that, when offered to eat, Bartleby responded that he would prefer not to.

So, Bartleby dies for his devotion to his own principle, but what is the principle? Is there a principle worth dying for? For what purpose did Michel die in Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (1960), and what was the point of Alain ending his life in Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (1963) ?

Herman Melville quotes from the biblical book of Job in his epigram for the epilogue of Moby Dick: ‘and I only am escaped alone to tell thee’ (Job 1:15). But also the final line of dialogue in ‘Bartleby’ is taken from the same source: the narrator is asked if Bartleby sleeps, and the narrator affirms that he does, ‘With kings and counsellors’ (Job 3:14), implying that he sleeps with the dead.

Job was a good man who was faithful to God, and despite his obedience, God took everything from him and tested him with the worst misfortunes. The book poses the question of how a just god could allow such injustice, and Job resigns himself to the answer that God’s reasoning transcends his own powers of understanding and that obedience is wisdom itself.

If Alain is a samurai, to whom is he obedient. If he is obedient, why?

On its face, Le Samouraï is the slickest of noir thrillers, but beneath this elegant exterior it poses, in its own style, a question that lies at the core of the aesthetic philosophy of Nouvelle Vague.

What’s the point?

The French were too cool for such outbursts, but Herman Melville’s response to the question in the final lines of his own story:

Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!