I’ll admit that if you had asked me a few days ago if Jean-Paul Belmondo
was alive I would not have been sure one way or the other. Yet when I read
that he had died it was a kick in the stomach. Not that I was a huge fan
but it was another landmark gone. So many of those landmarks in acting and
music from my youth are disappearing but some affect you more than others.
Belmondo more than most. Just the name Belmondo brings certain youthful images
to the surface. The tough kid in those early gangster films, the rebel running
down the street in the New Wave movies, the adventurer doing his own stunts
in later films. A large smile that would crack up his face into angles. I
wonder if he ever thanked whoever broke his nose in a fight. It gave a rather
plain face on the verge of being ugly real character. The nose, the thick
lips, the wary eyes made his face memorable – easy to caricature. Sexy to
women. Masculine to men. Impossible to forget. Along with Delon, Bardot and
Deneuve they were the faces of French films to most people outside the country
for the 1960s and 70s. Their films made it around the world and helped shape
people’s opinions of the French. Gave them a coolness they don’t really deserve.
Belmondo brought equal amounts of bravado, insouciance, humor and sensitivity
to his roles and always with energy and charisma. He made it to 88 which
isn’t bad and I have no doubt he had a lot of fun in those years. RIP. I
have a few films of his that I never got around to – now seems a good time.
In this film Belmondo is past his youthful exuberance with his forehead heavily
lined, his skin around the mouth and eyes a little slack and his body bulked
up like weightlifters going soft. His eyes are fully jaded and weary. He
is still doing his own stunts though and has a few good dust-ups in this
one. His character Joss was in the French intelligence and was sent on a
mission to kill Jala, the dictator of an African nation. But by the time
he got there the mission was aborted and he was fed to Jala by his own people.
They don’t kill him but do torture him and put him into hard back-breaking
labor. But as his teacher says later, this only made him stronger. And angrier.
When he escapes in two years he makes his way back to Paris to complete his
former mission. To kill Jala who is visiting and to do it under the noses
of the men who betrayed him.
Very nicely done. It builds up the suspense as Joss keeps outsmarting everyone
as the film goes back and forth between the hunter and the hunted - but which
are which? He wants to humiliate them. So he lets them know he has come to
kill Jala, visits his wife under surveillance, beats up those who are rough
with her and visits a colleague knowing there will be men everywhere to stop
him from leaving. Rubbing their faces in it. Maybe ridiculously so. Maybe
a death wish. But he has something to prove. Two years of beatings to make
someone pay for. Belmondo underplays it all the way through – no theatrics
– just a face that has purpose and doesn't really care if he lives or dies.
