The muted ambivalence of the man and the actor

In the antagonistic star couple that he formed with the extroverted, cheeky Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon always embodied silence, muteness and isolation. On the release of Alain Cavaliers La Grange (The Undefeated1964), François Mauriac wrote this clever compliment in The literary Figaro: “He never speaks as well as when he is silent.” We must question this lack of words. Was it the price of this sensual, brutal seduction that dispenses with words? Was it a break with a typically French tradition based on the love of language and rhetoric? Was it the sign of an unspeakable secret that had to be protected? But what secret? Perhaps that of the actor's muted ambivalence, a trait that best defines him as a person and as an actor and explains the unrest he arouses.

It is clear that the shocks that cause this unrest must be kept quiet. Great art and nefarious trade. Grace and violence. Angel worship and depravity. Femininity and masculinity. Regulars and mistresses. The policeman and the gangster. Progressive deeds and reactionary ideology. There are too many scandals to hold it all together. The mark of duality, stamped like a desirable disgrace on the cover of his career, came very early, when he succeeded Gérard Philipe. The dates are remarkable. The idol of French cinema in the 1950s and the embodiment of an idealized tradition, the gentle, romantic Philipe died of cancer in 1959. The year before, Delon landed his first leading role in Pierre Gaspard-Huit's Christinea mediocre remake of Max Ophüls' flirtationin which he played a young lieutenant who is in love but is destined for a tragic fate.

This role is not far from the role that Philipe played in one of his greatest successes, René Clair’s The big maneuvers (The big maneuver1955). This was not the first coincidence between the two male icons of French cinema, as Christian-Jaque proved when he directed Fanfan la Tulipe (1952) with the former and The black tulip (The black tulip1964) with the latter, 12 years apart. Delon played the dual roles of twin brothers, aristocrats fighting for justice on the eve of the French Revolution. But it was evidently not so much the resemblance to Philipe, but rather the dissimilarity that put Delon in the hearts of the audience.

Ambiguous and elegant usurper

Far from the image of his predecessor, who was infinitely darker, more insidious, more brutal and wild, Delon found in René Clément the director who shaped his image and entrusted him with the role of Tom Ripley in Full sun (Purple Noon1960), adapted from the novel by Patricia Highsmith. An ambiguous, elegant and stunningly beautiful usurper, he murders Maurice Ronet's character and thus symbolically gets rid of this potential rival, another handsome man in troubled waters. This double-faced character often walked a tightrope in his major films, whether as a corrupt revolutionary in Luchino Visconti's The Guépard (The Leopard1963) or as a right-wing militant who La Grange.

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