A woman is examined by a male doctor. Middle-aged and afraid, she stands naked in his office, her arms crossed over her breasts. A nurse sits nearby, taking notes of what the doctor says. His manner is brisk, like that of a farmer buying a horse. He grasps the patient’s head, swivels it this way and that, and opens her mouth to inspect the gums. Her nostrils are measured, as is the distance between her nose and her lips. The doctor checks her hairline and pronounces it “low.” He orders her to walk and declares that she has flat feet. “Based on morphological and behavioral data, the person examined could well belong to the Semitic race,” he concludes. She gets dressed and asks how much she owes. The cost of her humiliation is fifteen francs.
Such are the opening minutes of “Mr. Klein,” which is set in France in 1942. Very few films begin with this peremptory power. Notice that, although the scene takes place inside, we gain an immediate sense of a wider world gone wrong. The woman’s lack of protest tells us that she is far from alone in being manhandled, and that her ordeal conforms to an established routine. These anxious hints are a trademark of the movie’s director, Joseph Losey, who lived from 1909 to 1984. He was a master of interiors and a connoisseur of dread.
“Mr. Klein” had its première in 1976, at Cannes, and came out in America the following year. Since then, it has proved hard to catch on the big screen. Now it is back, restored to its clammy glory, and showing for two weeks at Film Forum. For hunters of rarities and students of wartime oppression, the emergence of “Mr. Klein” will be an event to match that of another fierce appraisal of Occupied France, Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Army of Shadows,” which finally arrived on American screens in 2006, thirty-seven years after it was made. All good films come to those who wait.
Alain Delon plays Robert Klein, an art dealer who lives in style on the Rue du Bac, on the Left Bank. His apartment is stacked with pictures, and he himself is a kind of objet d’art, lounging in a sumptuous robe with green and gold stripes as if posing for a portrait. Outside, he wears a well-cut suit, with an overcoat and a hat, which he lightly tips, as etiquette demands, to those he greets. He might easily have slipped from the pages of Proust, and it’s only proper that Delon went on to play the Baron de Charlus, one of Proust’s most formidable characters, in “Swann in Love” (1984). As for Losey, he toiled in vain, for years, to refashion “In Search of Lost Time” for the cinema. Harold Pinter wrote a remarkable screenplay. Bernstein and Boulez were approached to compose the score.
If Proustian manners persist, in the era of “Mr. Klein,” they resemble elegant clothes draped over a sickly body. Folks still frequent the cabaret, relaxing with cocktails or champagne, but the audience is dotted with German officers, in uniform, and the entertainment features an actor masked as a cartoon Jew, who lurches offstage to much applause. Klein is there, too, with his girlfriend, Jeanine (Juliet Berto), doing his smiling best to enjoy the show.
This urge to accommodate oneself to new conditions, however unsavory, and perhaps—should the opportunity arise—to take advantage of them is visible throughout the film, and all the more galling for being couched in courtesy. Witness Klein, at the start, doing business with a Jewish customer who wants to sell a seventeenth-century Dutch painting, presumably in readiness for leaving France while he still can. A little haggling ensues, and Klein gets the painting for a pittance. (Its subject is a gentleman, clad in black, holding up a flask that contains a golden liquid. Could it be urine? Is he another monitor of the human species?) Though Klein would never put the matter so crudely, he is reaping a tidy profit from the persecuted. He floats above their woes.
Not for long. One day, a copy of a Jewish newspaper is left at his door. Klein is dismayed, and he presents himself at the offices of the paper, calmly explaining that, as a non-Jew, he should not have received it. Proceeding to the Préfecture de Police, he learns that there is a second Robert Klein: a welcome relief for our hero, for what is more easily resolved than a case of mistaken identity? The trouble is that he is now a figure of interest to the authorities. His very attempt at clarification has trapped him in the machinery of state, the workings of which the film invites us to watch—the long black Citroëns sliding out of police headquarters, in convoy, or the wall-size map of Paris on which the corralling of undesirables can be plotted, district by district, when the hour of reckoning descends.
Like Orson Welles, Losey was a Wisconsin boy who spent much of his adult life in exile. What drove him abroad, in 1951, was the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the accusation—quite correct, not that he or anyone else deserved to be blacklisted, let alone hounded out—that he had Communist sympathies. (In 1935, he went to Russia, and attended a parade in Red Square. “The old boy up there was Uncle Joe,” he recalled. “It was impossible to think of him as other than warm, lovely.”) In common with many of those who profess a revolutionary faith in the betterment of mankind, Losey could be mean and difficult toward individual souls, and his rancor was compounded by ill health. On his birthday, during the shooting of “Mr. Klein,” his asthma was so bad that Delon had to blow out the candles on the cake.
The miracle of the film is that Losey had the imaginative guts to probe his own fears and failings. To have one’s mail opened by the F.B.I., as he did in America, is to be schooled in paranoia—ideal training for the creation of Klein. The governing theme of the tale, Losey claimed, was indifference, “the inhumanity of the French towards sections of their own people.” Hence the vital presence of Delon, one of the most pitiless of stars. Because he is a natural hunter, notably as the assassin in Melville’s “Le Samouraï” (1967), it’s deeply discomfiting to see him dwindle and pale, for once, into the hunted. So caustic, in fact, is the atmosphere of “Mr. Klein” that his beauty seems to peel away, a loss unthinkable to the audiences who swooned over him in “The Leopard” (1963). Klein has no eyes for anyone but himself and his alter ego, and those eyes are the color of a winter sea.
He is hardly the first person, it must be said, to fall victim to a predatory glitch. “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” So runs the first line of “The Trial,” lit by Kafka’s terrible clairvoyance. Hitchcock, of course, preferred the comedy of errors, and the bellboy at the Plaza, in “North by Northwest” (1959)—who calls out for “George Kaplan” and gets Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) instead, thus unleashing the rest of the story—foreshadows the page, in Losey’s film, who strolls among the diners at La Coupole, in Paris, exclaiming “Robert Klein!” But which Klein is being summoned to the telephone? Could both be at the restaurant? It’s no surprise when our Klein, like Thornhill, decides to turn detective, and to pursue his other self.
Sleuthing takes him to a number of destinations. One is a seedy refuge in Pigalle, with rat droppings on the floor and a lone bullet, left in a drawer; another is a château in the countryside, with snow on the ground and a highborn family in residence. The lady of the house (Jeanne Moreau), we gather, is the lover of the second Klein, though she confuses the issue by visiting the bedroom of the first. Our man also travels to Strasbourg to see his aging father (Louis Seigner), whose outrage at the suggestion of Jewish blood in the family’s veins is all too revealing. “We’ve been French and Catholic since Louis XIV!” he cries out. (Losey offered the part of the father to Fellini. No luck.) Strewn across the film are a handful of clues, which lead us to suspect that the other Klein is a member of the Resistance—that he is as brave and as principled as Delon’s Klein is slippery, suave, and hollow. In one haunting sequence, the two of them speak on the phone. Yet I continue to wonder, viewing the movie again, if the gallant Klein truly exists, or if the art-loving, morally compromised Klein merely needs him to exist. Maybe we all dream of a better half, who could somehow atone for our sins.
So do we actually see the double, face to face? Never. The closest we get is a glimpse of a hand, supposedly his, raised aloft and waving, like that of a drowning man, in a crowd that is swept along at a Paris velodrome. By now, it matters not a jot, in the bureaucracy of terror, which Klein is which, for the roundup of Jews is under way, and the trains are waiting. One of the final images, in Losey’s icy labyrinth of a film, is of children being forcibly torn from their parents by officers of the law. How blessed we are to live in a decent and democratic age where such things could not possibly occur. ♦
