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Alain Delon: Style, Stardom and Masculinity . Edited by Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron.

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knw156

1468-2931

Phil Powrie,

Cinema and Media Studies

Star studies are now firmly embedded in academic work in French film, with two milestone monographs by Ginette Vincendeau in 2000, and Guy Austin’s AHRC-supported project in 2003. However, most book-length French star studies have focused on women stars: Arnaud Chapuy on Martine Carol in 2001; Susan Hayward on Simone Signoret in 2004; Ginette Vincendeau on Brigitte Bardot in 2013; Arnaud Duprat de Montero on Isabelle Adjani and Hélène Tierchant on Musidora, both in 2014; Yves Uro on Marguerite Pierry and Jeanne Fusier-Gir, and Jonathan Driskell on Annabella, Danielle Darrieux, and Michele Morgan, both in 2015. The exceptions are Vincendeau on Jean Gabin in 1993 and my book on Pierre Batcheff in 2009. This collection on Alain Delon is therefore an important step forward, not least because Delon’s career spans over fifty years since his breakthrough in the early 1960s. He is one of that decade’s quintessential stars, with groundbreaking performances in films such as Le Samouraï (dir. by Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967), one of the most iconic gangster thrillers in the history of cinema. Delon covers popular cinema and more arthouse work, as well as television, and like many stars he has diversified into production as well as fashion. Moreover, he had an international career, especially in Italian cinema, in ways that were more sustained than, say, Gérard Depardieu’s attempts to work in the US market. This collection, building on previous work by Vincendeau and Austin, and Graeme Hayes in 2004, successfully manages to cover the broad range of Delon’s career and persona in ways that are profoundly illuminating. There are excellent studies of his narcissism, his international profile and its relationship to French culture, his impact on fashion culture, his move into production and directing, as well as close analyses of the interplay between the modern and the traditional as France shifted gear in the trente glorieuses , and two fascinating chapters on Delon dubbed in his Italian films, and Delon as singer. What comes across is just how out of kilter Delon has been and remains. He is unlike New Wave stars of the 1960s, for example; and he holds provocatively illiberal right-wing political views. As Sue Harris says in her excellent account of Delon as ageing star, he has always been ‘a star out of step with his own generation’ (p. 163). It is almost as if his persona of homme fatal , with its icy distant beauty, has forced him throughout his career to be a permanent outsider, a narcissist fascinated by his own image, as characterized by repeated sequences of him gazing at himself in the mirror (Ripley in Plein soleil (dir. by René Clément, 1960), Jef Costello in Le Samouraï ). Gwenaëlle Le Gras captures Delon’s protean and perplexing persona well, showing how he was able ‘to split his career neatly between two worlds, the elite and popular culture, as he was able to move from cop to criminal, masculine to feminine, past to present, France to Italy while remaining an unknown quantity, indefinable and impossible to capture’ (p. 56).