Aujourd ‘hui Alain Delon est mort. Well, he didn’t die today but does remain deceased after his weekend departure aged 88, so interpret the grammar as you will. And, if the line sounds strangely familiar, it’s because it’s a straight lift from the opening of Albert Camus’ L’Etranger.
Where they meet is in representing a certain encapsulation of things Gallic. Or at least une certaine idée de la France. Philosophical, vaguely criminal, indefinably cool and, of course, dead.
A friend and I used to joke about certain ever-embellished French caricatures. Glancing to the right was Gaston. Overalls as blue as his five o’clock shadow and the smoke from the rough fag stuck to his lower lip. A lip downturned in resignation, the shoulders raised in a permanent incipient shrug and his hands grasping the wheel of a bull-nosed Berliet truck.
To the left was a man whose role was to step forever from a doorway, raincoat collar up, pausing only to stub his mégot underfoot. As he did so, he would inevitably turn to moody black and white, the dissipating smoke clearing to reveal joylessly handsome features. He would head to a tabac where he would meet an impossibly beautiful girl who loved him wordlessly and melancholically. Coffee, cigarettes, and what Mick Jagger once referred to as “the tyranny of cool”.
This latter undoubtedly had his roots in Alain Delon. A man who got lucky. He drifted into acting on the basis of his looks. But rarely looked happy about it. “What I am is an accident. I have been placed in an orbit and I have to stay there and just be.” He once told a French TV interviewer.
“Very quickly and very early on I was alone fighting against the elements, against life, against people, against the difficulties of life.”
Sometimes, characters write themselves and, often referring to himself in the third person, Delon seemed to do so using a French archetype. The lone wolf, a man alone, the outsider, l’étranger.
Accused often of playing “a handsome man with a pistol”, this was in no small part because he was a handsome man with a pistol. His early years were marked by stealing guns while in military service and his latter years by keeping them all over the house. “I can’t open a draw”, said his first wife Natalie, “without finding a gun in it.”
His life seemed to be a series of sexual scrapes and criminal scandals involving his close proximity to murder.
All of which, life imitating art, brings me neatly to the coincidence of having recently watched Deux Hommes Dans La Ville (Two Men in Town) in which Delon plays a criminal released early on parole from a 12-stretch.
Try as he might to go straight under the patronage of Germain Cazeneuve, a former policeman devoted to the redemption of serial criminals played by a lugubrious Jean Gabin, everything conspires against him.
The policeman who originally arrested him spots him in a chance encounter with known criminals and begins a campaign of harassment. His faithful wife is killed in a road accident and, on finding love again in the form of Lucy, her mistreatment at the hands of the same persecuting policeman leads, like Meursault in L’Étranger , to the guillotine. A scene Delon plays with affecting simplicity.
“Very quickly and very early on I was alone fighting against the elements, against life, against people, against the difficulties of life.”
Across that life, Delon was prone to giving interviews of great grandiosity in which it was hard to tell whether he was making it up for his own amusement and in which it was also hard to tell whether life was imitating art or vice versa. No finer example than Deux Hommes dans La Ville.
Which leaves us wondering whether he was a fine actor – he was given many awards and a Légion d’Honneur – or the self-described accident and simply ‘Delon’, third person singular.
Either way, he remains that man stepping forever from a doorway under the tyranny of cool; caricature and, sorry, “icon”.
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