Actors: Alain Delon, Francois Perier
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Some film worlds are expansive - they suggest a past, present, and future of the characters inside that world. This is not so with Le Samourai, a movie concerned solely with the present. The title character, who goes by the name of Jef Costello, is an ideal of film badassery, but it's hard to imagine him outside his film context; difficult to imagine his childhood, or how he came to be how he is.
No matter, since what we get out of Le Samourai is a kind of Parisian film noir - everyone's doing a great job of looking out for Number One and looking really cool while doing it. Highly recommended, and were I between the ages of 15 and 20, this would be an easy five-star film.
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do you find Ghost Dog similar?
ReplyDeletehaven't seen ghost dog. i have it on my list, though.
ReplyDeleteEh. This is another one that I didn't like as much as I though I should have, if that makes any sense. That seems to happen to me a lot with foreign films. I hate to say this because there are some foreign films that I love (Oldboy, Cinema Paradiso, Sanjuro, Yojimbo), but I think subtitles take away from my enjoyment.
ReplyDeletei finally went and asked the internet: ghost dog is openly an homage to le samourai. i shouldn't have had to ask (but i did see ghost dog first, and a number of years earlier)
ReplyDeletele samourai has like no dialogue though, jtg, or at least not very much.
ReplyDeleteah okay ian - i will steer clear of ghost dog for a while then.
I'll be honest, I don't remember Le Samourai very well (I'd comment more if I had a better memory for this kind of thing). I just remember that I was a little disappointed. I see now that I gave it a 6 on IMDb. If only I had started a film blog five years ago so I could make an intelligent defense of my rating.
ReplyDeletebig fan of this movie when i saw it at age 20
ReplyDelete