by Renée Lepreau
a filmography
Plein Soleil (1960)
Not yet attached, I find Delon's youth detexturizes
his face a shade too far into pretty-boy.
Not even the beach umbrellas are sad when he ends
the movie by walking out of the frame, unaware
and smiling, towards the police.
La Piscine (1969)
Giggles behind us throughout an extended murder scene.
Christina guessed the woman was high, which had not occurred
to me. It usually doesn't. Caleb guessed nervous confusion.
I thought sadism. None of us asked.
The villa itself did little to help or hinder the dramas
playing out on its shadeless terraces.
In the final scene the woman trying to leave calls for a taxi.
Click. Delon's crooked finger on the phone receiver.
Clatter of the handset returning to its cradle.
The ambiguity of their embrace is more menacing
than all the violence that came before.
Caleb said doing nothing never felt so violent.
The camera lusted after everyone equally.
Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
Delon with a mustache. Really his snowed-in
face needs no ornamentation.
The director Melville said he made a Western,
which tracks perfectly.
As you know, the great Westerns survey the guilt
obscuring all our blank, animal hearts, shrouded
in the invisible veils of defilement.
Here Delon kills only in self-defense.
Today I asked my students to think of an alternative
to Red as a Rose.
Red as a stop sign. Red as a traffic light.
But in the movie nothing is as red as the rose
given to Delon by mystery babe, the rose
which presages the blood we know will follow,
making good on the promise of the pool cue,
chalked with escape routes untaken. More red
even than the chairs in the Relaroute, where Delon
and his comrade begin their meet-cute at the throbbing
of destiny, which is not the same thing as karma,
much as Melville liked to ventriloquize the Buddha.
One waits almost for a kiss,
but the heist is a more complete consummation.
We root for the robbers because they're hotter,
because they use only one perfectly alchemized bullet
aimed at the key to all locks to get the job done,
because they have the most to lose and the most to gain
in the game of getting by.
Monsieur Klein (1976)
Mostly I remember the bathrobe, striped hues
of green silk, blue eyes buttressing the brow
now furrowed, around whose folds the butterfly
of panic flits, lands with escalating frequency.
It's possible that Delon is at his least murderous
yet most deliberately immoral, cheating refugees
of their art as they flee France.
The movie couldn't let him live, obviously. In stories
we need karma to execute its lawful unfolding
within the frame's purview.
In real life, the complicit, which includes me
and my federal tax dollars, are rarely punished,
at least not in the physical realm.
Les Seins de Glace (1974)
A different kind of killing. Mercy.
By the time it happens I can't really blame him.
At least the last thing she saw was mountains.
Le Samourai (1967)
Fingers glissade brim of hat. At that moment
we are made aware of the delicacy of a pro.
The bird never gets it, as in gets killed,
but it does get it, as in the acceleration
of its chirps alerts its keeper to danger.
Will anyone remember to feed the bird
after Delon is dead?
It is said color is drained from the film.
But isn't it the opposite, saturation so far gone
the negative is starved—
a cipher soaking up all light?
You do not want Alain Delon's white glove treatment.
In real life he probably murdered his bodyguard,
but that's old news. His 1960s visage is too pristine
for that kind of detail to spoil the movies.
Delon is 86 years old. Although the tabloids
say he asked for assisted suicide in March,
it is now October and he is still alive.
There are no bullets left in the gun after all.
Life is un habitude, and like all habits
difficult to break.
Renée Lepreau is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing from UW-Madison and the recipient of the William W. Marr Graduate Prize in Creative Writing as well as scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Community of Writers and a residency at Ucross Foundation. My poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, TYPO, Seneca Review, The Boiler, Southeast Review, and others.