Presence

“(Alain) Delon is not so much a good actor,” David Thomson wrote of his performance in Jean-Pierre Melville’s immortal French noir “Le Samouraï” (1967) for Criterion in 2005, “as an astonishing presence.” That’s not to downplay the ability of Delon, but to emphasize his gift, of knowing how to exist before the camera in order to harness its power rather than over-exerting himself to try and seize it. That gift was not entirely innate, though. As he recounted to British GQ in 2018, the director of his first credited role in “Send a Woman When the Devil Fails” (1957), Yves Allégret, gave him the lesson that would crack the code: “Listen to me, Alain. Speak as you are speaking to me. Stare as you are staring at me. Listen as you are listening to me. Don’t act. Live.” Delon lived in “Le Samouraï” just as he lived five years earlier in “L’Eclisse.” I’d seen that movie before I watched it in a Roman COVID hotel in 2021, but lemme tell ya, that movie comes across like absolutely nothing else when you have been stuck in the same tiny room for two weeks in the Eternal City. His presence there is altogether more powerful when at the end…director Michelangelo Antonioni takes it away.

I was thinking about all this on Sunday afternoon, the day Delon died in Douchy, France aged 88. I had gone to the Albany Park neighborhood with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife for tortas and the place was showing some middling action thriller, the kind that is somehow nondescript despite so many gaudy colors and flashy edits, playing on Spanish language TV. I wasn’t paying attention until, suddenly, Bruce Willis appeared. It must have been one of those movies, though which one, who knows, Willis may or may not have made under some measure of duress as his memory started to go given how, as far as I saw, he was barely in it, hardly spoke, and seemed to just be in one location. (His character appeared to be kidnapped, possibly, and tied up.) But even in this, whatever it was, never mind the plot, when Willis showed up, you could detect a change in the air. Just in existing, he imbued the camera with a presence beyond all these other yammering youngins around him who were trying so hard to act.

Delon is gone, and Willis is gone in his own way, and I’m left wondering when actors of the next generation will decide to live again.