Mr. Klein: It’s All in the Name

Losey’s film is deliberately nonnaturalistic and selective in its historical reconstruction, building up a mysterious, ambiguous atmosphere. Some familiar period details are—sparingly—in place (the curfew, yellow stars, newspapers, Citroën cars), but others are ignored or displaced: for instance, the roundup takes place in winter, and unlike the stadium’s actual location, not far from the Eiffel Tower, the structure now appears next to railway tracks; nobody seems to have difficulty finding food, and other than for artworks, the black market is not represented. Losey compensates for this historical detachment with precise details concerning anti-Semitic persecution, an interest that came in part from his own experience of McCarthyism. Hitting the spectator immediately after the credits is a shocking scene in which a doctor humiliatingly examines a naked middle-aged woman to assess her degree of “Semitism” (the medic stands in for Professor George-Alexis Montandon, a champion of “scientific” racism, who contributed to the anti-Semitic exhibition The Jew and France, which ran in late 1941 and early ’42). Mr. Klein clearly indicts Klein’s profiteering in buying Jewish clients’ works of art at bargain prices, along with the grotesque anti-Semitic show he attends with his girlfriend, Jeanine (Juliet Berto). Losey equally avoids the nostalgic aesthetics of the mode rétro that pervades films such as Lacombe, Lucien and François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980). Instead, costumes are relatively neutral, difficult to place in time. We hear only briefly the chansons from the period, while the modernist score instills a sense of dread. And unlike Truffaut’s film and others that recreated the period on studio sets, Losey’s shooting on location in the streets of Paris produces another aesthetic disjunction: the streets, the buildings, and the people often appear closer to the midseventies than to 1942 (the open-platform buses that are used for the roundup had been discontinued as recently as 1971 so would not have seemed ancient to contemporary audiences). Another way the film is anchored in the time of its making is through its star, then an icon of modern masculinity.

It is not difficult to see why Delon was interested in making Mr. Klein. His character dominates the film from beginning to end, he is the object of spectacle, and he drives the narrative. In his first collaboration with Losey, The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), Delon had stolen the show as the mysterious businessman Jacson, sent by Joseph Stalin to kill Leon Trotsky (Richard Burton) in Mexico. Jacson at first is superbly in control, in impeccable suits, slicked hair, and dark glasses, holding the beautiful Gita (Romy Schneider) under his spell. Delon here is closer to the cool contract killer he played in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le samouraï (1967) than to the real-life figure on which the assassin character was based. Losey told Ciment that he appreciated the star’s “coldness, ambiguity,” a sentiment he inserts into The Assassination of Trotsky, in which a man removes Jacson’s glasses from his face and says, “You don’t talk. What goes on behind these quiet blue eyes?” Yet, as the film unfolds to its bloody finale, Delon’s increasingly disturbed character falls apart. While Mr. Klein centers on its protagonist’s nightmarish quest for identity, Losey also tests Delon’s own hermetic and narcissistic star persona.

The film strongly implies that Delon-Klein’s insistence on his radical difference from the Jewish Klein only masks their profound similarity, and thus suggests the possibility of his own Jewishness. There are hints that he resembles the other man in the conversation with his father, in the Dutch painting he extorts from his Jewish client, and in the many testimonies from other characters. For this play on identity, Losey cannily deploys Delon’s narcissistic gaze. Klein is repeatedly seen looking at himself in mirrors or reflected on surfaces during his quest for his alter ego: in his apartment, on his landing, in a café, at La Coupole brasserie, in the château bedroom, in the glass of a framed display of his father’s medals. This motif suggests that there may not be another Mr. Klein, that he is ultimately investigating himself.

According to Delon’s biographer Emmanuel Haymann, the actor was bitterly disappointed by the film’s lukewarm performance at the box office, and by his failure to win the Best Actor César for his role. Judging by the competition that year, this is indeed surprising, even without going as far as Ciment, who in Kazan Losey darkly suggests a cabal against Delon. For Haymann, Delon’s fans simply rejected roles outside his usual cops and killers. But other reasons may help explain this semi-failure. On the one hand, Losey’s cultivation of ambiguity makes it difficult to grasp all the nuances of the intrigue in a single viewing; on the other, audiences may not have liked the unpalatable truth about French anti-Semitism during the occupation. But one thing is certain: Mr. Klein marks the high point in the second half of the star’s filmography. While he went on making hugely popular thrillers and won critical acclaim for Notre histoire (Bertrand Blier) and Swann in Love (Volker Schlöndorff) in 1984, no film after Mr. Klein was able to deploy, explore, and challenge his star persona or inspire his acting in the same way. Rarely has there been such a perfect fit between character and star. Delon does not just play a character; he is Mr. Klein.