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Paris Envy
May. 25th, 2006 03:07 pmPeople who know me well (but who, dear Reader, really knows any of us well?) can affirm that I have a habit (a bad Hobbit, as my karate teacher used to say) of falling into odd little temporary obsessions. Or not so temporary. So lately I have been on an Alain Delon kick. Now I would be the first person to acknowledge that Alain Delon is not a great actor. He is not Belmondo; he is not Trintingnant. But in his prime he was a damn fine piece of meat, or as the French say, a bit of the old friandise de l'oeil.
So I bought and watched "Borsalino and Co." on DVD, a movie I have always been fond of not because it's a good movie, which it is not, but because, well, Alain Delon in a borsalino. And I enjoyed all the fashion statements as much as ever.
But then I also bought Le Samourai, which Criterion has recently restored and released on disc. I had never seen any of Jean-Pierre Melville's movies. Why? Where was I? How could I have missed this? This is the most amazing movie. It is astonishing. Somewhere in the bonus materials, someone remarks that Delon and Melville understood that a movie star doesn't act; he is seen. Well, that's certainly true in the case of Delon, but in this nearly dialogueless movie it works perfectly. And Delon has never been more heartwrenchingly, dangerously, genderbendingly frighteningly beautiful. Paris in the rain is equally beautiful and grim. Melville says he wanted to film a black-and-white film with color stock, and he did it.
And Delon wears a fedora. Even better than a borsalino! If that were possible.
* * * *
Some blogspam:
James Urbaniak outdoes himself, celebrating the end of his tragic lawsuit against the nefarious uberVerizonist Josh Emery:
http://urbaniak.livejournal.com/37468.html?nc=29
OK, well, you maybe have to have been following the saga from the beginning to get all that, but still: dancing Chuck Norris and baby pandas, how can you go wrong?
And Cleolinda, the Internet's best film critic, is one-upped by a rodent:
http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/401004.html?nc=97
So I bought and watched "Borsalino and Co." on DVD, a movie I have always been fond of not because it's a good movie, which it is not, but because, well, Alain Delon in a borsalino. And I enjoyed all the fashion statements as much as ever.
But then I also bought Le Samourai, which Criterion has recently restored and released on disc. I had never seen any of Jean-Pierre Melville's movies. Why? Where was I? How could I have missed this? This is the most amazing movie. It is astonishing. Somewhere in the bonus materials, someone remarks that Delon and Melville understood that a movie star doesn't act; he is seen. Well, that's certainly true in the case of Delon, but in this nearly dialogueless movie it works perfectly. And Delon has never been more heartwrenchingly, dangerously, genderbendingly frighteningly beautiful. Paris in the rain is equally beautiful and grim. Melville says he wanted to film a black-and-white film with color stock, and he did it.
And Delon wears a fedora. Even better than a borsalino! If that were possible.
* * * *
Some blogspam:
James Urbaniak outdoes himself, celebrating the end of his tragic lawsuit against the nefarious uberVerizonist Josh Emery:
http://urbaniak.livejournal.com/37468.html?nc=29
OK, well, you maybe have to have been following the saga from the beginning to get all that, but still: dancing Chuck Norris and baby pandas, how can you go wrong?
And Cleolinda, the Internet's best film critic, is one-upped by a rodent:
http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/401004.html?nc=97
