Le Froid is overwhelming in this, the chilliest film of director Joseph Losey’s chilly career. Alain Delon is M. Klein, a profiteering art dealer in Nazi Occupied France, buying at bargain rates from Jewish collectors desperate to raise cash, suddenly confronted with a paper-trail doppelgänger, a second M. Klein. Worse, a Jewish M. Klein. With family documents stuck in the country, he must find the elusive ‘other’ Klein or lose everything. And so many comfortable things to lose! Paintings, apartment, mistress, maybe even friends . . . if he had one. A Kafkaesque tale, but Kafka with logical explanations. Something that could land in intellectual No-Man’s Land were it not for Losey's consistently distanced style, one that refuses to warm up to any characters: friend, foe or administrator. This leads to trouble in the last two reels when the script pivots to suspense/thriller tropes as we get close to the second M. Klein. Even a race against the clock/last minute rescue opportunity, traditional narrative beats that don’t fit Losey’s impersonal tone. So a tragic ending feels wrong, comeuppance on a story that demands resurrected routine and no lessons learned.* Still, what is here is accomplished, with Delon’s unblemished amorality a match for his Mr. Ripley in PLEIN SOLEIL/PURPLE NOON/’60.
DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, René Clément’s PLEIN SOLEIL/PURPLE NOON/’60 (from Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’), overrated apart from Delon and the EastmanColor cinematography of Henri Decaë. OR: Luchino Visconti’s underrated THE STRANGER/’68, Kafka by way of Camus, with Marcello Mastroianni in a role Visconti wanted Delon to play. Alas, no good video source as of yet on the only film to ever properly capture Matisse Mediterranean blue.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Losey lets us (the viewers) off the hook, by not letting Klein off the hook.
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