Alain Delon, the disappearing gaze | Culture

In 2010, at the Cannes Film Festival, Alain Delon presented with Claudia Cardinale the restored version of The Leopard. For a moment, the actor remained at the back of the Debussy room waiting to go on stage. At 74, still with his light tan and unbuttoned white shirt, his already tired eyes still had all the depth and mystery of an actor who made the accident of his beauty one of the great monuments of the history of cinema. Delon's gaze was certainly intimidating, but when it came time to introduce the film, with a mixture of fury and pessimism, he declared: “Except for Claudia and me, the others are dead. So we appear here as simple survivors.

To say that Alain Delon, died this Sunday at the age of 88he was handsome, it is to reduce a man who symbolized like no other to a pretty vulgar face. the ambiguous nature of post-war Europe. The new and the outdated, the earthly and the unfathomable, the light and the dark were always present in his perfect face. It is no coincidence that it is Luchino Visconti, an aristocratic aesthete and communist, the man who shaped it in the early sixties. In 1960, at the age of 24, the actor presented two of his most iconic films and those that perhaps best explain the duality of his criminal beauty. In Rocco and his brothersby Visconti, played Rocco, one of the poor Parondi brothers, and in In full sunby René Clément, was the most disturbing of all the Mr. Ripleys. Saint and demon. Without flinching, even with almost no interpretation, Delon could be everything.

A year later, in 1961, Visconti agreed to bring the work of playwright John Ford to the theatre. Too bad she's a whorethe story of an incestuous love in which the actor would share the stage with another emerging star, the Austrian Romy Schneider, with whom he had just worked in the romantic drama Love affairs (1958), by Pierre Gaspard-Huit. Those who saw Delon and Schneider at their Paris debut remember the strong impression the young couple made on them. While the world was falling in love with them, Delon and Schneider began a relationship which over time has deepened its tragic aura and which, on screen, has blossomed into a thriller The swimming pool (1968), by Jacques Deray, one of the directors with whom the French actor worked the most.

It was shortly before returning to Visconti in The Leopard (1963) when Delon experienced a new glorious stage in Italian cinema at the hands of Michelangelo Antonioni, who closed his fundamental career trilogy of lack of communication with The eclipse (1961)in which the actor played a young stockbroker who tried to seduce an elusive Monica Vitti. Until the end of the 70s, Delon knew how to take advantage of his charisma to make good films. As in one of his great roles, in The Silence of a Man (The Samurai, 1967), by Jean-Pierre Melville or The other Mr. Klein (1976), by Joseph Losey.

In all these films, Delon demonstrated that he had the gift of calm; one only had to look at him to provoke mixed feelings, sometimes of helplessness, sometimes of danger, always of attraction. Like a panther or like a classical statue, what perhaps best explains his enigma, what makes his beauty something very far removed from the other great beauties in the history of cinema, is his decadent quality, something definitively extinguished. One day, the British photographer David Bailey asked Visconti if he considered the word decadent to be an insult and Visconti replied: “It's the opposite. It is important to be decadent because decadence will always be part of history and art. And the same could be said of Alain Delon.