Le Samourai and François de Roubaix's Score

Monday, July 20, 2022

The perfect film for me is Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai. I love it because I relate to the lead character Jef Costello’s stoic stance in life. I prefer to suffer silently and without complaints. He is neither sadistic nor masochistic; he lives in a code of his making. It’s based on the Japanese Samurai code of ethics, Bushido. At the film's beginning, Melville has a quote; There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle…perhaps that is an epigraph ascribed to the Bushido. Alias, Melville wrote and made up the quote, making me love him even more than anything on this planet.

Jef Costello may not have a soul. He knows love and approaches the romantic gesture when dying in front of Valérie, the piano player who witnessed Costello’s crime at the club where he assassinated a man. Everything is figured out to the maximum, and there is no trace of a chance of him getting caught when he goes out on a job to murder someone. Still, he is thrown into a world where it’s unclear why Valérie protects him by not identifying him in a police line-up. When he dies in the end, he smiles. Melville didn’t use that scene because the actor smiled in one of his other films when he died. I made a note to myself that when I die, I must smile. If I’m executed, either in the electric chair or in the firing squad, I will insist on not wearing a head covering, and I will be smiling.

The François de Roubaix score for Le Samourai is minimal, but with tension. The electric organ riff lurks in the foreground and background. Traces of jazz muted trumpet with electronics makes this score unique. The cocktail organ serves as the theme song for Valérie and lounge-style music (real lounge). But in the hands of the brilliant and masterful composer and arranger de Roubaix, he knows how to combine electronic sounds with acoustic instruments. It’s understated, as if not to disturb Jef Costello’s presence.

The artifice of style is genuine beauty at work. Both the film and the soundtrack catch me smiling again.

François de Roubaix