Okay, in preparation for Michael’s contribution to the discussions, I re-watched Le Samourai. As it finished, I found myself still all revved up, so I stuck in Seijun Suzuki’s Youth of the Beast, which I’d never seen. It rocks. And now I’m in a mood that may lead me to see Mann’s Vice this afternoon.
The mood? Anomitastic. Nihilicentious. Aggressubilant. Without stepping all over Michael’s jump-start on Melville’s film, some quick thoughts on these flicks.
The plots for both Melville and Suzuki hew to might familiar genre conventions, yet in doing so they unravel or reimagine the techniques or possibility of filming in this genre.
Melville’s elaborate, almost real-time attention to detail, as Costello (Delon) prepares for then deals with the consequences of his hit, dazzle because they seem so resolutely uncinematic. *MINOR SPOIILERS* For instance, Costello’s room has been bugged, and when he walks in he slowly starts going about his business but is cued by the caged bird that something’s amiss. We’re cued, too–there’s a sensitivity to detail that is crucial to Costello’s survival, and the film produces such sensitivity in us. Instead of seeing each frame, each sequence as a conveyance of one bit of crucial information (like a Hitchcock knock-off where camera composition, soundtrack, and an exaggerated reaction-shot by a hero would quickly define the center of our attention, the necessary signifier allowing us to unpack the scene), Melville’s film and Melville’s hero are flat, beautifully-composed, and they invite our gaze. But the gaze is not returned or appreciated… the affectlessness of Costello is doubled by the openness of composition and editing, where we get so much detail, see Costello reading and understanding the significance of that information while ourselves being unsure… What I’m circling ’round is how the film produces a sense that you experience the crime, the pursuit, the escape, the events portrayed — but are immersed in them, and haven’t any control over them, not even the limited agency of the interpreter, able to cull the significant from the mere background. The film performs the philosophical underpinnings its protagonist embodies.
So does Jo, in Suzuki’s Youth, but I found it neatly ironic that the French flick, stealing a plot straight out of American pulp, displays an infatuation with a quasi-Japanese sensibility, while the Japanese film, stealing a plot straight out of American pulp, ignores Zen and amps up the hyperbole of sensation and affect. I had never seen a Suzuki film, and I don’t know what I’d expected–I suppose, as most of the affirmations I’d seen emphasized a stylish anticness, that the films would be like that spy thriller Woody Allen stole and re-dubbed. Silly, maybe fun. Suzuki instead seems like a necessary evolutionary predecessor to Elmore Leonard and Tarantino–without giving up any of the sober brutality of the genre (or the consequences of actions and brutality in that world), there is a delight in the delirious, a ramped-up pleasure in the performance.
The film opens at what appears to be a suicide scene, shot in crisp compositions of black-and-white. (The titles, a weird green, are superimposed over b-&-w shots of crowds, staring away from us, at the crime scene–setting up a sense of voyeurism which the film delights in. Whereas Melville seems to ask us to see in every detail a hint of the protagonist’s doom, signifiers of the action, Suzuki seems to sarcastically show us how our desires pin us gape-mouthed to the consumption of such spectacular action.) And the sequence ends with a flash of bright crimson, a red camellia at the edge of a shot, before flipping into a gloriously-hued color stock for the rest of the film. That opening scene plants the seed of plot; thereafter, the plot occasionally bubbles up but it is the flow of color, composition, and desire which motivate the film.
I think I’ll end there, rather than going off on one of my extended multi-part rambles. I highly, highly recommend Suzuki’s film as a companion to the Melville, or in its own rights. (I’m going to rush off and get a hold of a bunch of his other flicks.) And I think the complementary but distinct aesthetics of the two films is worth pursuing further…. and Mann’s new film may be another neat addition to such a conversation, so with some trepidation I think I’ll forego the work I ought to be doing and escape the blunt hammer of the heat here in a theater this afternoon.