Le Samouraï
(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)
Nominated By: Siddon
101 mins, IMDb
Le Samourai starts out with a really cool establishing shot of a bedroom. My eyes are instantly drawn to the lying figure of, at the time, an unknown man on his bed. Also prominent in the shot, resting directly in the middle of frame is a birdcage. We hear the man spark his cigarette up and we hear the bird chirping, a sound that we don't currently realize is something that could come into play later in the film, but I have a feeling Melville knows what he's doing, fellas. The smoke rises up and love it or hate it, smoking is cool. I'll never do it, but it's undeniable. The tone is already set and we can expect this film to be cool as hell. And almost immediately after that we get a really cool moment where the camera follows Delon and rises up to his shoulder level and looks into the mirror with him as he fixes his collar on his trenchcoat and the shot flips as now we are the mirror as he puts on his dope ass hat. I'm already all in on this film. Moments later he is in the rain, a cool ass synth(esque?) soundtrack kicks in as we focus on Delon's eyes scanning his surrounding like the coolest motherf*cker in the world. I don't want to spend this much time going over everything in the film that I think is cool, because I would probably just describe every shot or every movement, but this film nails it from the very start. I will say that I did manage to find a moment that was very uncool though, and it was when he backs his stolen car out of the garage and isn't quite sure if he's clear of the sidewalks. There is a hitch in his giddyup as he is pulling forward and thinks for maybe less than a second that he's going over the sidewalk, I almost couldn't believe that it was in the film or that I found it so humorous. The second time he exits the garage, he gets it right.
Roger Ebert mentioned in his review of the film that Melville was obsessed with procedures, and it's hard not to see that. From the way Jef sets the hit up to the way the police handle their investigation and the planting of the bug and it's evident in the way time is always being kept. These procedures are detailed for sure, but it never seems excessive. And outside of just being really cool, this film is also pretty damn efficient. It tells you what you need to know if you just keep your eyes on it. Words are used when words are needed otherwise your eyes fill you in. After the hit, we see all the witnesses seeing what they can see of Jef. We can see who can see the most, and we can see who can only see vagueries. The exception being female musician who sees Jef eye to eye, yet tells the detectives that Jef's absolutely not the man she saw. I'm not entirely sure what to make of her lie, but my assumption is that we are supposed to believe that Jef, being the good looking man he is with those steely blue eyes, just has something to him that captivated her to lie for him with nary a word spoken to her. We don't get an immediate answer of course. As the film progresses, Delon's new mission is to find who ordered the hit, as they tried to rub him out as well. When he meets with the pianist again, we get a loving homage to classic film-noir with the shot of the two of them in the car. Like a great chess player setting traps that you might forget have been set, Melville circles us back to things earlier in the film to pay them off. Some things, like Jef's bird didn't seem like set ups to begin with, but that's how efficient this motherf*cker was. Jef didn't really need a reason for the bird, or maybe the bird could have been simple symbolism. Perhaps the bird is symbolism of something. Jef's canary in the coal mine is actually a bird. Two birds with one stone or two birds with one bird, because it establishes not just how crafty Jef is but it's also super dope.
When they are investigating the murder and bring in all of the usual suspects, it doesn't make much sense that they'd bring so many people in to be looked at it, but it does make for a cool visual to see all of those folks lined up in raincoats and hats. Siddon mentioned that this film likely inspired the likes of Tarantino and Anderson, but on the flipside, it seems to me like Melville was inspired by Tati. The lineup scene seemed like a Tati comedy film reel got soaked in booze and contaminated by cigarette and cigar smoke. When Wiener was being questioned and the detective had the suspects all get their hats and coats, even though it was for only a brief moment, they were all crossing paths with one another and I couldn't get the idea of Tati's movement out of my head. Plus there was the square shaped desks that seemed to be on rectangularly shaped platforms. Square edges seeming to be a motif found in Tati films is probably what made me think of him in the first place, so perhaps I was just trying to make everything else fit with it.