Delon was an acting aristocrat, just as Luchino Visconti was an aristocratic director, although the Italian was actually a certified count and a communist at the same time, and Delon grew up in mischief, in the loneliness of a child in a foster family and flunked out of school after school, and besides, he always drove on the right and was attracted to creatures like Jean-Marie Le Pen. And together they made such a “Leopard” that the word epic does not suffice. Visconti’s baroque cinema with Delon’s cynical charm is a mixture of the best spices added to the most exquisite dish. In Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers” he played a young boxer falling into crime – he was too handsome for a boxer, but he was convincing as an emotionally confused young man. Delon inevitably aged, but he never stopped being confused. It is said that he was a shadowy figure, but the dense darkness of his performance wonderfully illuminates world cinematography.
Of all Delon’s achievements, the most important are the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, the French giant of film noir, in which Delon played alternately murderers or police officers, invariably lonely and complicated, and in fact, conscienceless bastards. If cinema is full of morally empty police officers, ready to cross all boundaries of professional ethics to catch a criminal, then Delon is the greatest of them. The Americans may have Humphrey Bogart, without whom there is no noir, but noir – even in color – would not be complete without Melville’s films starring Delon, twenty years later. If you see Delon in an overcoat and hat, with or without a mustache, he is definitely one of Melville’s heroes. Delon is an extremely rare case where a man looks good with or without a mustache, and vice versa.
The image of a cold-blooded killer or a nasty cop must have weighed on him, because in “Flick Story,” a film he produced for his own glory, that is, for image purposes, he played the role of a good cop, and as a ruthless thug who doesn’t blink when he has to shoot someone completely innocent, he cast Jean-Louis Trintignant – the actor most associated with Lelouch’s “A Woman and a Man,” the melodrama of all time.
Could there be a more beautiful couple in the history of mankind, including all the Greek statues, than Delon and Catherine Deneuve in Melville’s Clay? Alternatively, only the duo Delon and Romy Schneider in “The Swimming Pool” can compete with them – a story about how idyll and happiness must be tinged with tragedy, that the past will come back and destroy everything, and death will dissipate carefree love. Delon plays a writer whose latest novel has been mercilessly panned by critics, which naturally frustrates him, but show me a writer who is not frustrated by anything. To look like Delon, to have a house with a pool in Saint-Tropez and to receive even the worst reviews for his books – an unattainable ideal. And Delon and Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s “Eclipse”. And to think that Zbigniew Cybulski turned down this role, because he was obviously criticized for not being able to handle it, although he could have played it with the director of “Adventure” and “Night” (it was before “Blow-up”) and with Vitti by his side.
There is some sign of the times in the fact that information about Delon’s death was less on the websites, than articles about the death of Franciszek Smuda. No matter how you look at it, coach Smuda did less for Polish football than Delon did for world cinema. And this sign of the times also tells us that every era has its Delon and every Delon must leave to make way for new Delons, and the loyalty of the audience evaporates like morning mist, because there are new gods, still young and beautiful. Does anyone believe that Timothée Chalamet will one day grow old, get sick and ugly, and maybe even die? Beauty is a curse – Delon was beautiful and his beauty, worthy of the work of Phidias, was seen primarily, and not in the characters he created. You looked at a gangster, a cop, a pickup artist or a crook and you saw Delon, and that was the weakness of his acting. Jean-Paul Belmondo was always ugly, so he could age with more dignity than Delon. In “Girl for Two”, where they played together as two potential fathers of Vanessa Paradis, Belmondo was 65 and Delon was two years younger. And it was worse to look at old Delon than at Belmond, to whom old age was obvious, and to Delon it was a crime.
