“Le Samourai” (1967)
Almost any of French visionary Jean-Pierre Melville‘s later films could qualify for this list, and almost any would probably be the best thing you’ll see all week (here’s our Melville Essentials if you want to find out more). But his “Le Samourai” is an iconic piece of work, a crime thriller so sleek and streamlined that it feels like it’s been pared back to nothing but the barest essentials: Alain Delon’s cheekbones and his impassive scowl. He plays Costello, a trenchcoat-and-fedora-wearing hitman of the taciturn, efficient and silently lethal variety (influencing numerous incarnations since from Ryan Gosling in “Drive” to Chow Yun Fat in “The Killer”). Early on, a job goes awry and he is suspected by the police and pursued by his former employers who want him dead. Throughout, his magnificent aloneness (though he has a girlfriend and a caged canary) and Melville’s slippery, lean direction makes the film move with stealthily lethal precision, and yet it evokes so much outside its spartan frames and pristine compositions. Costello is an immovable object, a paragon of masculine unsentimentality and stoicism whose journey toward a kind of redemption (which is really just the strict adherence to the quid pro quo code he’s lived his life by) is almost wholly internalized. Famously, Melville shot a different version of the ending in which Delon smiled, and intended to use it until he discovered that a different film of Delon’s had already employed this trick. As neat and delicious as that might have been, the purity of the film remains intact with the ending as is: there might be occasional flashes of tenderness, but nowhere in this world populated by aloof characters going mechanistically through the motions of survival is there room for joy —not in redemption and not even in death.
“The Element of Crime” (1984)
Whatever its particular stripe, noir is perhaps the coolest of genres, and not only in the sense of being hip. Its propensity for gritty, seedy locales, flawed psychologies and philosophical determinism (if not fatalism) make it among the least warm and fuzzy of cinema genres. Sometimes that emotional remove can be a barrier to engagement, especially when it’s coupled with an arthouse auteurist sensibility that takes almost perverse pleasure in complicating and fragmenting the narrative. Which is the long way of saying we can’t blame anyone for not immediately clasping Lars von Trier‘s debut feature “The Element of Crime” to their bosom. And yet, dense and manically allusive as it is, the film also dazzles with a kind of deranged cinephile reverence —it’s a little like what might result if, in a fit of existentialist despair, Guy Maddin took a bunch of cold medicine and watched Tarkovsky‘s “Stalker” on repeat. With a cast made up of mostly British film and TV actors (plus von Trier himself), the film tells the story of gumshoe Fisher (Michael Elphick) who, under hypnosis and guided by the crime-solving principles of a disgraced mentor, tries to pick up the threads of his last case in which a serial killer was hunting down girls who sold lottery tickets. But that’s only the bare skeleton on which von Trier gets to hang his extraordinary visuals —lit with sodium lights to give a sepia/monochromatic effect throughout, bar the occasional overlay—and which gives him license to play in the noir sandbox, using and subverting archetypes like weary voiceover, faithless women, ruined postwar locations and an adversary whom the hero very much fears he’s turning into.
