Le Samourai: Melville and the Coldest Hit Man in Cinema

Sun, 19 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000

The film opens on a nearly empty room and holds it. A man lies fully dressed on a narrow bed in the grey half-light, smoke rising from a cigarette, a small bird chirping in a cage by the window. Nothing happens for a long time. Then a title card offers a line about the loneliness of the samurai, attributed to the Bushido, the code of the warrior — an “epigraph” Jean-Pierre Melville is widely thought to have written himself and simply invented a source for, which is the perfect first move for a film so devoted to the beautiful lie of ritual. The man on the bed is Jef Costello. He is a contract killer, and over the next hundred minutes Melville will watch him perform the rites of his trade with the gravity of a priest at an altar.

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Le Samourai: Melville and the Coldest Hit Man in Cinema