Sight and Solitude in Le Samouraï (1967) by Jean-Pierre Melville (Part 1)

Jef Costello is a hit-man with airtight alibis, impeccable style, and a strict code of honor. Add to this a masterful ability to evade his pursuers, mobsters and authorities alike, and a simple but effective home alarm system in the form of a bird. But what he cannot orchestrate, control, or evade is the improvisational nature of a genuine encounter with another person, which he unexpectedly finds with the jazz musician who witnesses him leaving the scene of one of his crimes. Wes & Erin discuss Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 noir thriller “Le Samouraï,” and the surprising power of love to capture its fugitives, even if it means finding them in the most shadowy of underworlds. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Jeff Costello is a hitman with airtight alibis, impeccable style and a strict code of honor. Add to this a masterful ability to evade his pursuers, mobsters and authorities alike, and a simple but effective home alarm system in the form of a bird. But what he cannot orchestrate, control or evade is the improvisational nature of a genuine encounter with another person, which he unexpectedly finds with the jazz musician who witnesses one of his crimes. Today we discuss Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 noir thriller Le Samouraï and the surprising power of love to capture its fugitives, even if it means finding them in the most shadowy of underworlds. This is Wes Alwan. 1:20 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh. 1:22 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, there have been times in my life when I have been a bit of a loner and haven't left the apartment for a while. And it occurs to me, other than needing, I should get more, should have more of a social life. But also, if I were accused of murder, I'd be screwed. They'd be like, where were you on the night of such and such? I know exactly where I was. I was sitting in front of the tv. I haven't left my apartment in a week. Well, who are you with? No one. I would have no alibi. And it occurred to me in this movie, it's an interesting tension because one of the key skills of our protagonist, Jeff, one of the reasons he's a sought after hitman in the Parisian underworld, is that he creates these perfect alibis. But he's a loner. He's living the life of the samurai, the life of isolation, a life of solitude. Right. The film begins with that quotation, no greater solitude than that of the samurai. Those two things work against each other so that his alibis have to be manufactured. Of course, they would anyway have to be manufactured because he's really out killing. But it's a bit easier if you are plugged into some sort of social fabric to manufacture alibis than it is if you're a complete loner. 2:45 Erin: Well, you would pass muster, I think, for this police captain, because it turns out that the more perfect the alibi the more he suspects you. It reminds me of in the Lady Eve when Henry Fonda is told that Barbara Stanwyck, if she was trying to disguise her identity, would put on a fake nose and would do her hair differently or something. But because she doesn't disguise her identity and looks exactly like the woman from the ship, also played by Barbara Stanwyck, then she must not be the same person. There's a perverse logic to this, but, yeah, I mean, I guess you're okay as long as you have a bird, right? Because the bird actually fulfills several functions that maybe other ancillary characters would fill in a movie of this kind where somebody, a friend of his, would tip him off. Instead, his bird tips him off. And conveniently, the bird probably doesn't eat a lot at the craft services table and doesn't have to be paid. So it's a great way to go when you're casting a movie. 3:51 Wes: Yeah. There's the wonderful scene at the beginning where. So it opens on him lying in bed, and we have the chirping of the bird. So the bird, I think, is centered in the room, right in the little cage. And you get this sense that these are concentric spheres, the cage of his apartment and then the cage of the bird. And there's an obvious identification between him and the bird. It amplifies the sense of his solitude. There's also a lot of silence in the film, especially at the beginning. And the first thing we hear is this chirping. And it goes on for quite an extended period. The bird may have more lines in the film than Jeff. 4:31 Erin: I think that's right. If only Charles Schulz was transcribing everything and we'd get some indication of what he's saying. How's it going? Oh, you're still lying in bed. Okay. 4:42 Wes: So the bird is. You know, it reminds me a little bit of the pigeons and on the Waterfront in the sense that it's something that Jeff can show care and concern for. At least that's what we get in the scenes where he feeds it. It turns out also to be an alarm system. A very effective alarm system, and more effective than a lot of the kind of fancy technologies in the film that are used for surveillance and for other purposes. Ironically, the bird as a kind of canary in the coal mine is very effective in that sense. But, yeah, as a quasi companion or familiar. It's like the tiniest amount of companionship you could craft for yourself. You know, just one little bird in a cage. So that accentuates the Sense of his isolation and loneliness, I think. But I think there's more care and concern for the bird from him than there is for his girlfriend, if she is a girlfriend. Jane. 5:37 Erin: Yeah. 5:37 Wes: What relationship? Yeah. 5:39 Erin: What's that relationship about? 5:41 Wes: She likes to be needed. 5:43 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. She's pretty chill as far as girlfriends go. She's what you might call low maintenance if you were Billy Crystal, I guess. But no, no. I was thinking a lot about the. What should I call it, the sonic landscape of this film? The bird acting like a timekeeper or a metronome, sort of staying relatively steady with its chirps. And then we know it's been agitated or that someone's been in the apartment. Right. Because I think the rapidity of the chirps increases. And also the feathers in the cage show that it's been worked up, I think. But how important sound is in the film, how clickety clackety his shoes are in the sequences where he's walking and how kind of regular the sound is in most places. And then, of course, the main action of the film takes place in a jazz club. I spent some time trying to figure out why it was that he wouldn't have known that the piano player wasn't still on stage. And it's because the piano is still playing when he goes through the hallway. So she comes off stage, there's another pianist who is filling in for her in the combo. Not much attention is paid to that detail, but, you know, he must have still been hearing the piano and thinking that everybody who was on stage was on stage. But really she's a soloist who comes out and we see the. We see that there's another piano player and some horn players as well that occupy the stage while she's not on it. Then she makes an entrance at one point later in the film. That's something he didn't pay attention to, maybe. I think the metronome quality of the bird, or the bird as a timekeeper telling us that something's happened in between is significant in a story which takes place over the course of three days. Right. It's sort of like a ticking time bomb, the threads of the story coming together at the end of. Is it Monday? I think everything starts on Saturday. It goes through Sunday and then Monday. It's difficult to tell since it always seems to be this roughly the same time of day throughout most of the film. And it's pretty gray outside. Gray blue, like everything else. 7:38 Wes: So I think you're getting at the importance of sound in the film and part of it is the fact that she wouldn't have been alerted to. Or he wouldn't have been alerted to the fact that she might have left the stage because someone else took over for her. 7:51 Erin: Yeah. Though they sound quite different, the two pianists. If you listen closely, their styles are quite different. She's highlighted more. She's more of a featured performer, so she plays usually with just a rhythm section, whereas the other piano player plays with horns, where the horns are more heavily featured. But he's never been to that club before and he's not familiar with her style, so. 8:10 Wes: Well, that's a good point. So we can't blame him for his musical ignorance. No, we can blame me for my musical ignorance. That I such a thing. 8:18 Erin: You know, one of the things I was thinking about as maybe a corollary for this role, this Jeff Costello role, he's, you know, he's kind of a master stylist. He's a great performer. Right. I'm sure you. You probably cottoned onto the obvious parallel that one would want to make in the interrogation scene, or rather in the police lineup scene, where the suspects go up onto a stage and they seem to have an audience. You know, chairs lined up, many, many chairs, considering how few people are occupying them, where they're almost, you know, the casting. They're casting for the part of the killer. You know, the police captain as a kind of director and the mob boss who hired Jeff as a sort of, I don't know, competing director. You know, they're both kind of interchangeable. Right. Both after the same thing. And the police captain's hunch about Jeff being the murderer seems to be based on this idea that he's just so perfect for the part. You know, he's just. He fits the bill perfectly. A little too perfectly. And that what that connection also to the idea of performance and being a performer and having style, how that kind of connects him implicitly to the piano player. So that though we get very little information about these people, his quasi identification with her in the hallway, that sort of spares her life. Right after he makes that hit on Marty, that sets the whole plot in motion. That seems right to me. They seem set apart from the rest of the people in the film in a certain way. I don't know if you felt that way. 9:43 Wes: Interesting. You know, I hadn't really thought about the lineup as the analogy between that and casting. And were you saying that the police detective and the employer, they're in competition for the role of director? Is that what I. 9:58 Erin: Well, there are two Kinds of directors. And they're interchangeable. Right. We get a couple of scenes where Melville is making a clear identification between the head honcho who has hired Jeff to commit the murder and the police captain. At one point, the head honcho is pacing back and forth across the room and there's a seamless cut to the police captain pacing and talking to his men. And we see the police use the same tactics as criminals. Right. With their. The key ring. 10:27 Wes: Yeah. I was actually confused at that point whether it was the police or mobsters breaking into his apartment. It took me a while. 10:33 Erin: Yeah. You don't know at first until you. Until a later scene when the police captain makes a mention of the fact that they, you know, he found the bug that they had planted. Yeah, yeah. And the plainclothes officers too. You know, you don't. You don't know at any given moment what someone's allegiance is. Yeah, right. 10:48 Wes: But, yeah, the other thing that you mentioned is the sense in which he's a master stylist. I think I read in one review, it talked about his. The grace of his movement. He's very good looking. It must be very time consuming to be a hitman when you're also a model and consulting to the Paris Metro system on the way their system is put together. But he looks good. He always looks good doing what he's doing. I will say. Okay, so I do want to talk about also the other thing that you mentioned is his relationship to the Pianist. Because I think I said maybe the bird is his closest. The person that he's closest to. But obviously there's an important relationship to the pianist. In a way. She's the one who kind of defeats him. She sees him. So she's the antagonist in a sense, but she's also the mentor in a sense. It's one of these movies, I think, where you could argue the antagonist is the mentor. There's a movie called Collateral, I think it is with Tom Cruise. Yeah. So you know what I'm talking about. Jamie Foxx. Tom Cruise is basically the mentor. He's like a Yoda figure through that whole movie. He's mentoring the Jamie Foxx character. Tom Cruise character is. But ultimately the Tom Cruise character has to be killed by Jamie Foxx, has to be defeated. So I always try to make note of that when I see a mentor is the antagonist situation. It might be a bit of a stretch here, but you wonder when she first sees him if he's going to kill her. So there's a moment of anxiety. Oh, my God. Does she? Is she going to be now collateral damage? But he spares her, and then she becomes someone to whom he develops a kind of relationship. There's a certain point he's using her, of course, to try to figure out who it is or why the employer tried to kill him. And he's trying to use her to get to the employer. But I think there's a moment when he's talking to her where he kind of brushes her hair or he touches her to her head or something. It looks quasi affectionate. And then, of course, he spares her in the end and ends up essentially doing suicide by cop, even though he's been given a contract on her. So there's an important relationship there, which I think we'll get into more. But the other thing I wanted to say about this is one other aspect of the film that I was thinking about, which is related to this being id'd in the hallway by her, is that maybe you wouldn't need such airtight alibis if you weren't so careless and out in the open about your hits. He's walking around the club being, you know, recognized by everyone or being seen by a lot of people. He's a handsome guy, right? So he stands out. He's well dressed. This goes back to the sense in which, you know, as you said, he's a master stylist. You don't really want to look that good and be that out in the open as a hitman. So it's another. It's another odd paradox that he's a loner, right? If you're a loner, that's a perfect situation for wandering around unrecognized and doing everything on the down low. But that's not his modus operandi. His modus operandi is to be out in the open, but to craft these airtight alibis. 13:47 Erin: Yeah, that's something I thought about a lot. His style seems partly to allow him to blend in, but to blend into the universe of the Melville film. The color scheme, the, you know, the environs, right? Almost everything is black, white, or that sort of slate, bluish gray. And then when we find that he's, you know, in the lineup of all the other suspects, we find that Paris in 1967 was actually full of people who are wearing the same basic color patterns that he's wearing. Of course, none of them look as good as him. I think you're right about that, but I think that's part of the hat and the way he keeps his head down. So what you'll notice is he's only seen once. He becomes destabilized by the encounter with the piano player, who he spares. He spares twice in the film. So when he first comes in, he goes past the hat check girl unseen. And I watch this in slow motion to make sure that he wasn't seen by anyone. In fact, it's very, very carefully choreographed. He then is about to kind of run into those. Those two older couples that go into the club. He's about to sort of be in the foyer with them before they go into the club, or the. Whatever it would be called, the anteroom. Before the actual opening into the larger club space. In order to avoid being seen by them, he ducks into a bathroom, keeps his head down and his collar up, with his hat down low, so that when two men enter from the other side of the bathroom, he looks like he's washing his hands. And there's a great moment when he, you know, lifts up his hands with the towel in them. And we see that he's wearing the white gloves of death that he wears when he's about to make a hit. So he slips out. He goes along the side of the club to the back door that leads into the hallway. And no one has seen him up until that point. He manages to be invisible. But that very invisibility, I think, is woven in with this sense of style of his. You know, he fits the color scheme, he fits the world of the film. And it's almost as if the film itself, in its starkness, in the colors that it uses, which are picked up in the various elements of Jeff's outfits. It's almost as if the. The world of the film is an extension of his own sort of personal style in which he's. Like this flourish inside it, the pocket square in the film or something. And then when he has the encounter with the piano player in the hallway after he's killed Marty and he spares her, then he's thrown off. Then he runs back into the club. And the camera very briefly focuses on each one of the faces. And I made sure that they all lined up right. Each one of the people who ends up being in the witness room in the police station and then the interrogation rooms, et cetera, are all the people that see him, including then the hat check girl on his way out. So he's been totally thrown off. And something about this, yeah, has, you know, he didn't expect to see her. I think the key, again, is the fact that the music had piano in it. In the background. And he really didn't expect to see her there. He thought she was still on stage. 16:37 Wes: So that's a great detail. Yeah, that I didn't remember that I remembered him being ID before he makes the hit. But looking at my notes reminds me of, you know, I don't know. Do you have a photographic memory? Is that. How are you? How are you doing all this? 16:52 Erin: I do. I do have a very good memory. You know, I've seen the film a few times before. 16:56 Wes: We. 16:57 Erin: We've done it for this episode, and it's a Melville film and everything with him, it's like. It's like a watch, you know, it's. Right. Perfectly timed. It is difficult at first to, you know, it takes a few times watching it, I think, to really get your bearings in the film. Because, I mean, when, if you're watching this for the first time, you hardly know what's going on or what the background. And you keep expecting to get exposition that, of course, never comes, because thank God, it's not an American movie, it's a French movie. And you don't need to know any of that because it's all extraneous. Right. So. So you're just thrown into the situation. 17:29 Wes: You killed my father. 17:30 Erin: Right, sorry, right, yeah. And you're thrown into the situation and then you get all these faces, and then the faces, you know, you kind of recognize them when they recur again, but you don't put it together that it's like, oh, that's the guy that actually made eye contact with him in the half a second when he first walked out of the room. And that's the guy that made eye contact with him 10 seconds after he walked out of the hallway. It's really like a novel, the film that rewards rereading, you know, to catch all the details because it's just. It goes so quickly. 17:59 Wes: So, yeah, I just want to highlight this point that you're making, which is that my thesis about his carelessness, he's really. Is really actually an effect of the Pianist in the film. So it's not something that we can just say is habitual for him, that that's the way he operates as a hitman in general. And this is the thing that I missed, which is that he's careful going in. And then as he leaves, that's when you get all these moments that are accentuated by the director of him being looked at and seen by the various club people who will end up being interviewed by the police. This does, however, strengthen the idea of the Pianist as a antagonist slash mentor. So she's already produced the seeds of a change in him. It's going to be something that leads to him dying. He's not just arrested by the fact that she's a witness to the murder, that she's. She can ID him. She's not a witness to the murder directly, but you know what I mean. It's something about her. And that's, you know, when we first see her, you get these close shots of her and she has this very joyful look on her face as she's playing the piano. And I don't think we see that look of joy and that relaxed kind of spirit from anyone else in the film ever. Am I wrong about that? 19:18 Erin: No, you're not. 19:19 Wes: She's. He has this kind of grace about him in the way he moves and the style, as you pointed out. And maybe they're a match in that sense. She has some of that, but she's got the more thick and substantive psychological version of that. He has that on the surface, but she has it in spirit. 19:41 Erin: I'm thinking about her outfits. The club is black and white. He at first is wearing the typical kind of tan color of the trench coat. She wears white outfits or outfits that have, except for when she's. She's at home. White outfits or outfits that are sequined or have like glass elements. Like when she wears the white dress, it has around the collar and around one sleeve because it's one. One shoulder gown has almost glass looking type bobbles. So things that refract light, things that shine on her, that make light bounce off her. But it's very much indicative, I think, of the same kind of mysterious center that Jeff has. We don't know what's on the inside. Right. She's able to sort of reflect her surroundings, blend into her surroundings while still standing out as a stylish or someone well suited to those surroundings. You know, it makes me think about the significance of the fact that they meet in the hallway in that first scene when Jeff is lying on the bed and the credits roll and then he gets up and he gets ready to actually perform this hit. He ritualistically puts on his jacket and his hat and he puts his hat on every time with a bit of a flourish when he kind of runs his hand along the brim and, you know, we get a sense that this is someone who knows, that he knows he cuts a good figure. Right. And he's interested in this style and the appearance that he makes and his arena. If he's a performer. If we're going to go with this director idea, he's an actor who's been cast in this role of the hitman. He's been activated by the director, that is the mob boss. Right. So now he goes out onto his stage and he puts on his costume and he gives his performance, which is an odd kind of performance because it's about. As we're suggesting, it's about being unseen to a certain extent or blending in perfectly. And the pianist, too, is performer. And there are doors in the hallway. I notice marked privé, private. So, you know, she too, probably gets ready, puts on her nice outfit and then goes out and she has a sort of public presenting face in which she does her performance. And then, you know, when she comes backstage to take a breather or whatever she's doing, right. That mask is dropped maybe a bit. And so they meet each other in this unfinished hallway, which is. Looks like cinder blocks, basically, with very unfinished, unpolished hallway in between these two spaces, which are highly polished. The Marty's office is quite elaborate for the film. And the club itself is, of course, this little jewel box of black and white and glass. They both meet at the moment that their masks slip as performers and they see each other. And I think there's a kind of. Yeah, I think that's key to it. I mean, I'm really interested in this idea that she becomes a mentor to him, which I hadn't thought of, and I'd be interested in hearing more about that. But I think, too, that they're both like. They're on each other's level. And then we find out, of course. Right. That she's actually her employer. Could be the same as his, in fact. Right. She seems like she's sort of being kept by this mob boss and that the club is actually an extension. You know, it's maybe a front maybe for some kind of criminal operation. We don't know for sure. But she's living with this guy, Right. And so, in fact, her employer may be his employer. She's another puppet in the theater of particular man. So, yeah, I don't know if I'm making too fine a point of this, but I think it's. That's. I think what then the final action of the film hinges on. But I don't want to get there quite yet, this idea of, you know, the actor then becoming the director, you know, taking control of the scene. Interesting talk about this mentorship idea, because I hadn't thought of that. 23:19 Wes: Well, their interactions are sparse in the film. So it's a bit of a stretch, but I think this moment where they meet, which you've described very well in this unfinished hallway between two polished places where the shields are down, so to speak, he's caught unawares. And the thing to do in that situation would have been to kill her, but he doesn't. He sees something in her. It's not, is it, love at first sight? I was reminded of Groundhog Day a little bit when he first sees what's her face while he's doing a fake satirical weather report. When he gets that look, you know, the protagonist gets that look on his face. Bill Murray. So not necessarily love at first sight, but something that is transformative, something about her personality which sets him on a different track, ultimately. A track that's going to be fatal, but changes his course. And that begins with not killing her, not with not rubbing out the witness. And then they have. Let's just think about their few other interactions in the film. Maybe we could just trace that arc and see if we can make a case for mentorship. I say she's also the antagonist because nominally it's the. It's the police and the boss. I mean, the employer and all that, but she's really the one who defeats him in the end. All right, so what's the next scene where they meet? There's the meeting in the hallway, and then he goes into the club. He goes in quickly and leaves again. 24:44 Erin: Right, so the next time she sees him would be when he's. He's in the lineup on the stage, so to speak. 24:49 Wes: Right. 24:50 Erin: Yeah. And she says something like, you know, he wasn't wearing a hat like that. The hat he wore was darker. So she's trying to, you know, sow doubt into the mind of this police captain. And we get her saying explicitly, I think, at that point, that it definitely wasn't him either there or in the. Subsequently, in the offices of the police. 25:09 Wes: Yeah. I think in the later scene, she's. She's more definite about it. She doesn't overact. 25:14 Erin: Yeah, I like that. Yeah. 25:17 Wes: She's pretty subdued in the way she approaches that. 25:20 Erin: Yeah. And the police captain makes it clear that, you know, she is their key witness. And so it all hinges on her word. And she says it definitely wasn't him. 25:29 Wes: So he saves her, and she returns the favor by saving him. 25:33 Erin: Yes. 25:34 Wes: Although, you know, it turns out it seems to be motivated by a command from the employer, who is perhaps her boyfriend. 25:41 Erin: Yes. 25:42 Wes: We don't know, but it's not all that clear what's going on, you know, what's motivating her? Is there an element of altruism in it? An element of the desire to save him? Or is it purely just about being in cahoots with the boss? It's not clear. 25:59 Erin: Well, if it's immediate, I mean, he seems to have some effect on these women. Right. And rightfully so. So she wouldn't be the first woman with an older lover to want to. Want to get with Jeff on the side if she was. 26:12 Wes: Jeff on the side. 26:12 Erin: Jeff on the side. 26:15 Wes: Alibis. Friends with alibis or something. Alibis with benefits. 26:20 Erin: Right. 26:20 Wes: You provide the alibi, I'll provide the good looks. 26:24 Erin: That's right. I think in the police offices, after she says it's definitely not him, he thanks her and she says it was nothing. 26:31 Wes: Right. 26:31 Erin: Probably there's significance in that, but I won't. I won't split hairs, but I think it's to say they speak. Yeah. 26:37 Wes: He says, merci, and she says, well, it's translated as the least I could do. 26:43 Erin: Oh, really? Okay. 26:44 Wes: But it might have been. If you're listening to the French, it might have been de rien or something like. I mean, what, de rien? 26:50 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Then the next time he sees her, he goes into the club because he goes twice at the end, at the fateful point, right? But he also just walks in to order the whiskey that he doesn't drink. He never. I think, you know, we see him pretty continuously for three days. He gets shot and stuff, but we don't really see him eat anything or. And then he doesn't drink the whiskey. He doesn't drink the whiskey. 27:15 Wes: He's the Terminator, basically. He's the. 27:17 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He drinks. He drinks Evian and smokes. Smoke cigarettes and otherwise he doesn't need. He doesn't even need sunlight. Yeah. 27:25 Wes: That's all the Tin man needs, that. An oil for the joints. 27:28 Erin: Right, Right. She sees him and shakes her head kind of no at him, like, you know, get out of here. You know, and then he waits outside. And that's when she comes out after her evening is over, you know, concluded at the club, right. And she goes to get into her car and he ends up getting in with her. And they have a pretty interesting conversation on the drive back to her place. That sequence is the longest that they see. 27:50 Wes: So he asks, you know, why did you say you didn't recognize me? And she says, why did you kill Marty? He says, I was paid to do it. She says, what did he do to you? Nothing at All, I didn't even know him. It's the first and last time I saw him. And then she says, Quelle sorte d'homme êtes-vous. I think that's what she says. What kind of man are you? Did I get the French right on that? 28:10 Erin: Yeah. 28:10 Wes: So that, you know, that's an interesting exchange in light of the fact that it makes it sound like she didn't know that Marty was going to get killed, which is plausible because why would she go back there at that particular time? I don't know. She doesn't know that that's going to happen. So I don't know. I don't. I'm trying to figure out the extent to which she's acting on behalf of the employer. Then why. Why does she become a target in the film? Why must. Why does she have to be killed? 28:35 Erin: I assume because of this exchange. They must have known, right? The police know. The police captain. I pretty much have figured out, I think, that anything the police captain knows, you could pretty much assume the mob boss also knows. When one says something, you know, you could assume that it's. It's known on both sides. They both seem to operate via the same methods and have the same information and are pretty much, you know, morally equivalent. If not. Sometimes the police captain, I think, is a little worse. But anyway, the police captain, when he goes to the girlfriend's apartment, Jeff's girlfriend's apartment, you know, he goes through a series of interesting techniques to try and ingratiate himself with her or to get her to talk. At one point, he mentions to her that right now Jeff is in the piano player's apartment and that they've been, you know, he embellishes it and says they've been inseparable ever since, trying to insinuate that they've started an affair as one of his tactics to get the girlfriend to rat out Jeff. So if the police captain knows that he's been at her place, then presumably the mob boss knows. And also we know that the club into which Jeff has walked that same evening, and after which he ends up getting into the car with a woman. The club is all stocked with these mob people who show up in the apartment with the mob boss having a conversation. The bartender being the most obvious or maybe the only example. Right, but we know the bartender sees everything and he's. He's obviously on the mob's payroll for this. I'm assuming it's a mob, but you don't know some criminal enterprise calling it a mob for just to call it 30:01 Wes: what do they call the mob in France? 30:03 Erin: Le Mob, Just like Le Samouraï. 30:05 Wes: Le mob. 30:06 Erin: Yeah. No, I'm making it up. 30:09 Wes: Oh, no, I believe it's probably true, actually. 30:13 Erin: Yeah, probably those American words. 30:15 Wes: Well, let's. Okay, so she has to be killed because. Why? What's the theory again? Because the boss knows. The employer knows that. What? 30:23 Erin: Yeah, that she's been fraternizing with Jeff and knows too. She becomes a liability. Something like that. 30:29 Wes: Okay, so what could she do, though? I mean, what could she say to Jeff that's a problem? I mean. Okay, so let's look at. Maybe he's worried about the pianist. Maybe the employer is worried about the pianist revealing his location, which turns out to be the pianist location. Right? So after getting in the car with her. And by the way, these scenes of him, he enters the club. Okay. And then he leaves. And then there's that home invasion scene with the police breaking into his place. And then he meets the pianist outside the club. And then you see you get a scene of the police being quite desperate at the police station, interrogating someone, saying, you knew Marty. And guy's like, I was driving back to Paris or something like that. 31:09 Erin: That's. That's you not having a good alibi. I was just hanging out. 31:13 Wes: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And then cut to the pianist's apartment, which turns out to be the employer's home. But we don't know that at this point. He says, I have to know who hated Marty enough to kill him. She says, why should you care? He tried to kill me at the payoff. Gotta find them before they find me. She's like, you know them. They hired you. And he says, I only saw a go between. So she starts playing now while they're talking. And she has this ability to play while other things are going on, including at the end when he's coming to kill her and holding a gun on her. 31:47 Erin: She's a professional. 31:48 Wes: She ever stopped. She's a professional. Yeah. And he says, you didn't identify me for one of two reasons. You enjoyed playing with the police or you were told not to recognize me. And that's when he touches her hair and neck, which is the only time I think we see him being affectionate, except with the feeding of the bird. And he ultimately says to her, if the person who hired me is a friend of yours, I'll find him through you. And then she just says mysteriously, call me here in two hours. I don't know what that means. And then she doesn't pick up the call. 32:20 Erin: Yeah, that's one of two things. 32:21 Wes: Call me here in two hours. Like she is gonna rat out the employer and then changes her mind. And maybe that's why she becomes a target. I don't know. What the. Is she under surveillance? What's going on? 32:33 Erin: Right. Yeah, yeah. That's one of two things in the movie that really, really bother me. You know, the other thing I didn't think of is of course she's wearing, or until this moment, she's wearing that black robe with this, you know, the sort of Japanese sy on the back identifying her as another samurai, potentially. Right, but I suppose the implication of that might be that they slept together. No, maybe I'm reading too much into that. But she's suddenly wearing a robe. I just. I just thought of that right now. So maybe. 33:03 Wes: No, that's a good point. 33:06 Erin: So she's also cheated on the boss. 33:08 Wes: You know, I'm the guy who had trouble figuring out it was a prostitute. He was sleeping with a prostitute. And notes from the underground. So I'm not surprised. I didn't think of it in this case. 33:17 Erin: You're so innocent. 33:18 Wes: The settled sexual subtlety does not work decorum. And. And, yeah, but. Okay, no, that makes sense. So she's cheated on him, she's cheated on the employer. 33:30 Erin: Perhaps. But also they seem to have a desire to just get rid of anybody associated with this particular hit to contain the. The spread of I don't know. 33:39 Wes: Right. So if he has asked her to not identify Jeff, then she also becomes. She knows something. 33:46 Erin: He's not in any state of undress, but maybe he's a never nude. I don't know. Has to be wearing an impeccable suit all the time. 33:54 Wes: I mean, he's lying in bed, right? I mean, we've seen him lying in bed, but only with. Is he still wearing his button down? He's definitely wearing his pants and his button down shirt as well. 34:05 Erin: Yes, I think so. 34:06 Wes: It's only the coat, only the blazer and the hat that come off. Really. 34:10 Erin: In the trench coat, though, he does seem more relaxed there than he has seen anywhere else. And, you know, lounging around as. As he would in his own place. So. 34:20 Wes: All right, so I want to. I want to go with the sex thing. Yeah, I like that. I like that for him. 34:24 Erin: Yeah. 34:25 Wes: So the mentorship, you know, I think I had suggested. Yeah. That there's some kind of love at first sight thing going on in the very beginning. And mentorship, you know, that's inherently part of what it means to be mentored in this is to be transformed by love, basically, which is what's going on. 34:42 Erin: Oh, I see. 34:43 Wes: It is the thing that also defeats him because it's not in a way something that's compatible with him as a samurai. Right. As an ultimate loner. It's not going to work for him. It has to destroy him. 34:55 Erin: Right. 34:55 Wes: So the two things become one. Some people are healed by relationships and some people are healed then killed by them. Well, healing then death. 35:06 Erin: Well, I like the idea then that the police captain, when he's interrogating the girlfriend is actually correct. And his, you know, he says they've been inseparable since that night. And he says something like, seems like true romance. Right. Sometimes he uses a phrase like that. True romance. Or they seem like they're soulmates. 35:23 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. 35:25 Erin: Maybe he says that the girlfriend is the soulmate of Jeff and Wiener, her older lover, is just there to pay the bills. I can't quite remember. But, you know. So it's interesting then that he's actually kind of correct in his. As he is in his assessment of pretty much everybody in the film and the situation. He sizes everybody up pretty quickly. So this thing that we think he's using to induce, you know, a confession out of her is actually correct. 35:51 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point because I thought he. I just assumed he was lying. 35:55 Erin: Me too. 35:55 Wes: But whether or not he's lying, he's certainly capturing at least a grain of truth. So. So that scene where he's trying to turn Jane basically in her apartment, that actually has the most dialogue, I think, of any part of the film. It's very, very dialogue heavy, unlike a lot of the rest of the film. And it might be the longest. I don't know if that translates into it being the longest scene, but at least felt like that. 36:17 Erin: Well, it certainly shows that he's not writing dialogue free scenes because he can't write dialogue because this is a great scene. He uses every possible angle and yeah, he's just running through. 36:27 Wes: I used to be zealous when I was younger. And now you're a fatalist. 36:31 Erin: Exact them all so well, he's. He plays bad cop, good cop, dad cop, boyfriend cop, slimy cop, you know, rapey, rapey cop. Yeah, yeah, creepo. 36:44 Wes: So the scene. Yeah, it works at a. Like a metaphorical attempted rape in a way. Oh, I think so. It's interrogation as psychological. An attempted rape which she successfully resists. I don't know. Is that too strong? 36:58 Erin: No, I mean. 36:59 Wes: I mean, because of the insinuations that he's making and. Sorry. Yeah. The fact that he's talking about his daughter. And it's just the creepy thing that you were identifying. 37:09 Erin: Yeah. It's a very, very uncomfortable scene. And it makes him so. He was already unlikable from the beginning. Likable and unlikable at the same time. Sort of. This actor, I think, normally plays comic part. So this is a casting grain for him. Yeah. And you do get that sense at first that he's sort of affable guy, and then he just, you know, we're on Jeff's side, so of course we're looking for Jeff to get away. So the police captain is put in the villain role by reason of our identification with Jeff. But then he really. His doggedness, his insistence on going after Jeff starts to curdle our opinion of him, I think. And then it just gets more and more. Ugh. And then this scene. Yeah, this is pretty gross. 37:51 Wes: Yeah. This might be the midpoint of the film. I don't know if you remember if it is or not, but. But it would make sense because it's sort of a psychological nadir for the film in the sense of this kind of disgusting sleaziness. This is sort of the last stand for any sense of moral decency or moral order. And it's defeated. Right. The police can. If you thought they were representatives of something noble or good in distinction to criminals. Right. You're disabused of that at this point in the film. 38:22 Erin: And this is the point right after this is when Jeff returns to his apartment and finds the bug that the police themselves have planted. So both of these strands of their moral dubiousness kind of coexist at the 38:35 Wes: same time in the film and attempts at intrusiveness. You know, this is part of, I guess, where I got the rape thing from. They're both attempts at intrusion. Right. The surveillance as well. And you could see the surveillance as something creepy and sexual as well, ultimately, if you wanted to. But something prurient or something perverse, you could add that as an underlying motive. But in her case, Right. They come in and part of what's so shocking about it is just they start tossing out the dresser contents. Right. And it's upper drawers of her dresser. I think it's underwear. And that's the kind of sexual component of this. So in her case, it's surveillance and investigation and searching. That's the nominal. That's the manifest content. That's the thing that they're doing on the surface level. But on Another level, it's just intrusion into private life, which comes out in the way he talks to her, like he shouldn't be talking about his daughter. And then, you know, he's making something of, you know, I thought you were a nice girl and making a thing of her having two boyfriends or possibly being a prostitute and having to call the vice cops on her. And of course, she's feisty and she doesn't succumb to any of that. She's good at resisting maximal psychological pressure and says, you know, you're trying to. Basically, you're trying to get me to perjure myself by threat of arrest, and I'm not going to give into that. 39:57 Erin: You know, another. Another tactic, actually, that I just thought of. They pretend to be Jeff at the door, too, right? So that's. I think that lends credence to this. This reading of the scene. And then one of them even does a yes or, you know, like imitates Jeff's voice and then. And they burst through the door. Sort of false pretenses of being the lover. She resists all of their tactics and remains loyal to him, even though when he does come and see her, you know, he doesn't look particularly tender towards her or anything. Like, she's getting very little out of this and yet maintains this ultimate loyalty at the cost of, you know, quite a bit. So she's sort of the heroine of, you know, of the film in a way that she doesn't give in to the police. 40:40 Wes: I think she needs to look for some nicer men to date. But, well, she's got. Is it wiener? Wiener, yeah, she's got Wiener. Who apparently is rich. Got wiener. The spirit of the. Got milk. 40:58 Erin: Well, she doesn't. She doesn't have him for. 41:00 Wes: It's a campaign to get women to choose better men. 41:03 Erin: Right. 41:04 Wes: Got wiener. 41:07 Erin: That's why I prefer to say the French pronunciation from the virgin air. 41:10 Wes: Wait, so what is it? 41:12 Erin: It's vinair. That's how they say vinair. 41:14 Wes: Okay. 41:15 Erin: Yeah. 41:15 Wes: All right, so why don't we. Yeah, why don't we break here? Unless you have any final thoughts on that, and then we will do part two. 41:22 Erin: Yeah, let's leave them with gut wiener resounding in their ears. 41:24 Wes: Got wiener. Thank you. 41:38 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. 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