Of Quasi-Americans Abroad

Like the cocky Americans it portrays, "Purple Noon," a recently re-released 1960 French thriller, succeeds because of its ability to disconcert. Disconcerting is the premise of the film itself, that French actors speaking French and dressed in French clothing can somehow seem American if given American-sounding names like "Tom," "Marg," and "Freddy." Disconcerting is Clemote's use of the Italian setting, on which noon-strength sun gnaws, leeching color from sails, crumbling villas and driving everyone pretty much mad. Most disconcerting, certainly, are the mesmerizing eyes of Alain Delon, who, as the poor but desperate Tom, is able to manipulate men, women, and, of course, the audience, with his cocainepure blue gaze.

Tom appears on the American scene in Italy as a professional friend, employed by a rich American to retrieve his neer-do-well son, Philipe(Maurice Ronet), who has been roaming around Italy spending his father's money and annoying his fiancee Marg(Marie Laforet) for a year. Philipe seems to take pleasure in torturing Tom, telling Tom that he'll return to America and Tom will get his money, while clearly having no intention of doing so. On a disastrous yachting trip on which Tom gets sunstroke, Philipe throws Marg's manuscript overboard, and Marg demands to be put ashore, it becomes clear that the tension between Philipe and Tom will soon lead to a drastic measure on one of their parts. A marooning, a stabbing, a forgery, a feigned suicide, a seduction, a framing and what seems like "the perfect crime" are all necessary to sate their rivalry.

The first half of the film is powered by the erotic virtual twinship of its protagonists, Philipe and Tom. The opening scenes show them always together-- imitating each other and people passing by, kissing the same woman simultaneously. Ronet and Delon even look uncannily alike with their blue-green eyes, tan bodies, open shirts and light colored pants. In perhaps the most disturbing scene of the film, Tom, alone in Philipe's bedroom, puts on Philipe's clothes and starts speaking as Philipe, pretending to address Marg and kissing his own image in the mirror. Philipe discovers him and orders, "Take off my clothes", which to contemporary ears sounds like a sexual demand. Incredibly, the homoeroticism of this scene was not apparent to the audiences of the sixties, but this coded tension is vital to understanding the vehemence of the two men's emotions for each other.

The second half of the film belongs to Delon, who, separated from Philipe and Marg, starts his own odyssey across Italy on which he attempts to emulate every extravagance of their decadent lifestyle. It is here that Tom's character is at last developed. The extremity of his ambitions and envy is demonstrated by his tigerlike eating--at times of tension he is seen devouring a peach in three angry bites, gnashing down a blazing chicken straight from the oven with his bare hands, slicing and gulping down long meaty lengths of sausage. All the while his sculpted good looks, strong cheekbones and short, rumpled hair bring an unnerving purity to his appearance no matter how viscious his crimes. The audience immediately sides with Delon's Tom because though he lives on deceit, he lies the American way--with practice, with no shame or guilt, and with the conviction that he deserves the upward social mobility his crimes let him achieve.

The supporting characters are less fully developed but no less perversely compelling. Ronet as the monstrous Philipe is the model of the Ugly American, throwing around money, speaking loudly, insulting everyone around him. His knife-in-the-back treatment of Tom-- he sets Tom adrift on a dinghy, embarrasses him by making him seem ill-bred, makes him steer the boat while he has sex with Marg-- makes him hard to like by any standards. The hapless Marg is wholly pitiable, toting around a guitar to which she croons mercilessly, plotting out her book on Fra Angelica, becoming a pawn in Philipe and Tom's rivalry and being utterly unable to fight back. The weakness of her character and even of her facial features is evident when compared to Tom and Philipe's strengths, and though one feels sorry for her helplessness, one can't help but see the Darwinian logic in her permanent victimhood.

The film is sensuously shot and soundtracked, with a fevered violence of color and angle. The shots of the yacht on the open sea show the true brutality of blue and white when sea, ship, and sky seem to continually lunge against each other and fight for dominance of the screen. Views of Italy are made to seem as craven and far from redemption as the protagonists themselves. There seems a matter-of-fact weariness even to the children at play in the street, as if to sense that their lives will never lose this frivolous emptiness, that the games will only get more complex, the stakes higher. The soundtrack alternates between Hitchcock-esque legibility, with every twist in the plot accompanied by a clashy crescendo, and a Eliot-esque silence, the whisper that signals the end of the world.

And, really, the end of the world is what "Purple Noon" brings to mind, a desperate era in which violent hatred and adoration amount to the same thing, where one person is interchangeable with any other, and most characters are, like Marg, the helpless victims of the machinations of stronger or more clever people. Yet "Purple Noon" never seems gloomy or disapproving of it's protagonists' mutual assured destruction. The potency of the film is undiluted by moralizing or even the sense that the story is being "told" from a certain point of view at all. The story of Philipe and Tom proceeds with a fearfully confident inevitability, as if narcissism and desperation had set off a chain reaction in which no outside force could intervene.