Alain Delon is dead | Premiere.fr

One of the greatest figures of French cinema has died at the age of 88. Which actor was Delon exactly? Tribute

To talk about Alain Delon, who has just died at the age of 88, we could simply reel off ready-made phrases: “legend”, “sacred monster”, “monument”, “tutelary figure”, “living myth”…; cite the hits that instantly became classics: Full Sun, The Cheetah, The Swimming Pool, The Red Circle, The Sicilian Clan or even Borsalino…; naming his conquests as pearls that he will have helped most of them to shine (the Romy Schneider period Pool for example), or even return to the dark and egotistical side of a man who landed in the deep end of cinema without really asking for it and, as the water there was rather good and gave him a flattering reflection, ultimately stayed. When he received his honorary Palme d'Or in 2019, Delon, moved to tears (which were apparently not those of a crocodile) threw out this phrase full of common sense: ” What is difficult now is to leave. “A way of reaffirming that a life as full as his required a disappearance to match.

The Signoret-Delon summit meeting

Unfortunately, we could have done without the last few years when the weakened patriarch found himself in the middle of a fratricidal war, perhaps recalling that Delon's chaotic childhood could ultimately only engender something other than a pseudo-Shakespearean drama in the age of social networks. The man has always considered his tossed-around childhood as justification for his errors:

“ Yes, I was a little thug. You know, prison, I saw it every day when I was a kid. My foster family lived in Fresnes near the prison.“

We could have done without the 80s Delon becoming like the Gabin he always admired, this father with very dubious morals (complicity with the extreme right, homophobic sallies…) … All that to say that these ideas of “myth” or “legend” are only worth it if we agree to see the beauty and the dirt that are hidden there. Time, as we know, will partially erase stains to keep only what remains once the great media wash has passed: the films and the roles.

Intensity and limits

The latter are mostly well known (although a B-movie is to be made) and it is interesting to ask: Which actor was Delon exactly? To understand his (non) acting, it must be remembered that its emergence (the end of the fifties) was contemporary with that of the New Wave which then imposed new models. Cinema leaves the studios, settles into real life and builds its fictions on the sidewalk. Naturalness erases theatricality. While Belmondo coolly walks down the Champs-Elysées with Jean Seberg in Out of breath Godard's, Delon, tempestuous, sails in Full Sun of the most classical René Clément. And already a style is imposed out of fashion, out of competition. Delon the self-taught does not seek composition and already relies on his electric charisma to exist. Where others can jump from one register to another (Bebél therefore!), the actor stuck in his technique will make this limit the first quality of his presence. Presence and of course the obvious, insolent and unjust beauty of a young man that the camera will adore. Delon was not fooled by anything:

“I still have to thank my mother, because she is the one who gave me the face I had and everything happened thanks to that. I got everything thanks to this beauty…“

The Samurai returns in 4K

In this The Samurai by Jean-Pierre Melville (1967), where his spectral coldness haunts the frame is an unsurpassable reference. Monolithic Delon speaks little, moves like an automaton, pierces each close-up with the intensity of his gaze and slams doors that are as many suspension points in the grammar of the film. This predisposition to restraint – vaguely haughty – did not prevent adding a hint of honey as in Rocco and his brothers Or The Cheetah where Visconti will have best worked this duality between ice and fire.

Ghost of himself

Delon was not a great actor, he was just tall, necessarily encumbered by himself, totally at ease at the table of his models (Gabin, Ventura…) He had become over time so conscious of his being and his appearance, that he kept his distance from artists in favor of artisans won over to his cause: Deray, Verneuil, Granier-Deferre, Giovanni… In the middle of these seventies that he would cross in all virility, we find paradoxically flaws which constitute by an almost chemical reaction, his most beautiful incarnations: A cop by Melville, an unloved film that he ghostly traverses like a faded hero; The Professor by Zurlini, where bags under the eyes, tears waiting, cracks slung over his shoulder, helpless in the face of the complexity of existence, he is simply magnificent or even Mr. Klein by Losey, a masterpiece where his inner duality gives each of his gestures a disturbing disquiet.

Three things to know about… Rocco and his brothers

Alone on his island

It is also interesting to remember that Jean-Luc Godard, from the top of his ivory tower, rubbed shoulders with Delon in New wave (1990). The two “legends” looked at each other with respect and distance. A period report on the shooting shows a circumspect Delon facing the iconoclastic methods of a filmmaker who can spend hours, even days, without recording a single image. Delon will be magnetic in it. Proof that the contours of the man could not be limited to the sole boundaries of his image. If speaking of oneself in the third person is ridiculous, it above all allows one to install one's ego on an island on which no one can land. A way like any other to protect oneself. This is why the muted game cannot really set a precedent. Because unlike the generosity of a Belmondo, the distance established by Delon is unattainable. Delon will have regularly left the warm sand of himself to sail to us, towards a world that suddenly agreed with his desires. No matter how rough or smooth the crossing was, once there, the hero accomplished his work and left with his secrets, his sadness and his doubts. We can find them at leisure in each of the traces he left on the screen.