In memoriam | Alain Delon: An Adonis who straddled masculinity, melancholy in one glance

CHENNAI: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.” These prescient words from TS Eliot’s Little Gidding, propel the heroine’s journey at the beginning of Run Lola Run (1998), an adrenaline-fuelled sleeper hit film from Germany. The nugget of poetry also serves as apt summation of my introduction to Alain Delon’s body of work. At the outset, it is essential to admit (in service of honesty) that this reporter has by no means, parsed through the entire filmography of the monumental French actor, who breathed his last at the age of 88 on Sunday.

On the contrary, I had just about managed to watch Delon’s star-making performance in Plein Soleil (Purple Noon, 1960), a few months ago. I had lined up quite a few of Delon’s films on a now worn-down hard disk — like French New Wave pioneer Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), an Arctic cold precursor to the existential gangster saga, featuring Delon as an inscrutable assassin wanted dead by both cops and the mob; to Mr Klein (1976), a crime drama involving mistaken identity, set against the backdrop of World War II; and I also managed to get my hands on a copy of La Piscine (Swimming Pool, 1969), a psychological thriller, that was way too risque for its time, but went on to inspire the 2016 adaptation, A Bigger Splash, directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call me by your Name, Challengers). Interestingly, the 2003 erotic thriller Swimming Pool, directed by Francois Ozon is tonally similar to its predecessor, but is rife with red herrings.

In fact, a remake is what brought me to the Chapel of Delon, as a few months ago, Netflix happened to drop a painstakingly crafted recreation, a cinematic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels. The black and white miniseries chronicles the adventures of the misanthropic, but magnetic psychopath, essayed by Andrew Scott. As fortune, and OCD would have it, stumbling upon Ripley could not be considered as a standalone event, as I found myself unable to binge through the series, until I had had my fill of all the precursors in the Ripley universe.

Beginning with Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), and Ripley’s Game (2003) starring John Malkovich, this scribe embarked on an anachronistic deep dive into the Highsmith multiverse. During the sojourn, I also brushed up on my backlog and remembered how I had caught a screening of The American Friend (1977), a German language spiritual precedent to Malkovich’s rendition of Ripley, before finally landing upon Purple Noon, the Alain Delon vehicle. For more reasons than one, discovering Delon’s portrait of Ripley seemed epiphanous, to say the least. The film is not just a flashy document of the swinging 60s and the libertarian mores of the sun-soaked coastline of Italian towns, but a launchpad for the force of nature i.e. Delon.

Those who’ve had the privilege to watch this film in all its 35mm glory in a theatre would undoubtedly have come out raving about the astonishing allure of the film’s leading man. The rest of us who make do with TV and mobile screens, still find some scenes breathtaking, and pause-worthy. Like the one scene where Delon’s Ripley strolls through a farmer’s market, and the shopkeepers can barely restrain themselves from offering Ripley a sample of their produce. Watching him insouciantly saunter into the frame, gaze over the horizon, or even nibble at a piece of fruit evokes a sensation of obscene voyeurism in audiences. And it vindicates Ingmar Bergman, who once said, “For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema.”