Rating: 5/5
Criterion Challenge 2022 | 52/52 | Any Criterion film on your watchlist
There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle… perhaps… — Bushido (Book of the Samurai)
Saturday, April 4th, 6:00 PM Jef Costello lay in his humble Paris apartment in stasis. He wears a full suit and black shoes— his hair is slicked back. A lit cigarette bellows meager plumes of smoke against the dark wood interior. A bird in a cage, its coat pale and grey, meeps mildly as rain tickles the windows and cars whisper past. The camera lens fisheyes, the edges of the screen pulling in toward us, distorting the total image into an unusual roundness. Jef rises as though something outside summons him and dons his trenchcoat and fedora.
Outside, he surveys the busy street, spotting a man leaving his car. Jef enters the car and retrieves from his coat a ring with dozens of keys. Patiently, he tries each key, one by one, until he finds one that will start the ignition. As he arrives, another car pulls up across the street. The woman eyes him, nodding, and drives on. Jef pulls into a garage, where a man silently replaces the tags before handing Jef a handgun. Jef pays the man with a wad of cash. As night falls, he arrives at an apartment building, where he rings Jane’s buzzer. Jane awakens and lets him in. The two agree as to what time Jef arrived and what time he will have left by.
Jef leaves the apartment a few minutes later and arrives at a hotel. He enters a room where men sit around a table littered with cards, cash, and cigarette butts. Again, he sets a time when he will return, 15 minutes after he has left Jane’s. He parks down the way from a nightclub called Martey’s. He slips in, dodges into the bathroom, dons white gloves, slips through the back doors and passageways of the club, and arrives at a private office. There sits Marty, the nightclub owner. Jef tells Marty that he will kill him and then shoots him with three bullets. The club’s piano player, Valérie, walks by when she hears a noise. Jef opens the door to meet her face. He slips off his white gloves and leaves, spotted by several witnesses as he makes his hurried exit back to the car.
I never lose. Not really.
Will Jef Costello escape the police this time? Or did he finally make his career-ending mistake?
— What do you think of Costello? — I don't think.
The film is one of the most influential in the crime thriller genre. From Ronin to John Wick, Taxi Driver to Heat—they all point back to Jef, who is the pure, undiluted hitman who only seems to come to life when it comes to doing the job and doing it to perfection. In Drive, Ryan Gosling plays it straight. In John Woo’s The Killer, Chow Yun-Fat dreams of being Alain Delon in this movie. Tom Cruise in Collateral provides a deconstruction of the archetype and the loss of a soul that accompanies it—perhaps the key to Michael Mann’s outcasts lies in Jef Costello.
The organ-heavy score works for me! It has that Baroque fugue-like layering that keeps in step with the film’s tension. It reminds you that you’re rooting for the killer for no other reason than it’s his story you entered first. But all the different stories have been coming and going, their intersections merely blocks of time for Jef to account for and moments seared to memory for them. I like the way its motifs play out in the more “noir jazz” parts of the score.
The detective who refuses to give up on Jef being the killer possesses the same temerity and stillness, fully confident in their actions because nothing has led the men to question them. But we, the viewer, can see what they won’t admit to others, or perhaps even to themselves—words are just words, no matter how many or few you use. It’s all “by the books,” however, that looks for a hitman, and indeed not how US police act.
The truth is not what you say. It's what I say—whatever the methods I use to get to it.
I think I have to say it: this is a technically perfect movie. It has not a second wasted, not a misplaced shot—just a masterclass of tension and pacing. Even when I wanted to look away, I couldn’t. It feels timeless — I could see a director making this movie today and changing very little beyond the camera lenses. I honestly didn’t think I would like this movie as much as I did.
— I never talk to a man holding a gun. — Is that a rule? — A habit.
Alain Delon is perfect for this role. No one would call him a world-class actor, but the man can walk around and look pretty. What doesn’t get talked about enough is how much cooler Caty Rosier is.