“You are with the people you love, with the friends you have chosen. It is your last moment and it is fair that you be the one who chooses.” With these words Alain Delon referred last year to assisted suicide. He did it in one of his last interviews as well. Quickly, the headline, it was just that, became a kind of premonition. Alain Delon approves of suicide, it could be read as a warning perhaps of what was to come. And it will come.
Now, another interview, not with him but with his son Anthony, seems to make it clear that the mythical actor of ‘The silence of a man’, ‘The leopard’, ‘The eclipse’, ‘In full sun’, ‘The pool’ , ‘Rocco and his brothers’ or ‘The other Mr. Klein’ seems determined to, indeed, be him who decides. The conversation took place on the RTL network and in it the also actor limited himself to making it clear that his father had asked him, he had asked him to die. Nothing more.
The fact is that immediately afterwards and to clear up doubts, he made a note public. “I would like to thank everyone who has been with me all these years; everyone who has given me their support. I hope to become an example for future actors both professionally and personally, between victories and defeats,” it was read in a text that, in its own way, does nothing more than confirm the creed of an essentially irreducible interpreter and, very importantly, a resident in Switzerland, where what is legal in France is not.
Alain Delon is 86 years old and it is no secret that he was going through a moment between delicate and just heartbreaking. In 2019 he was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes amid heated controversies and a little later he suffered a severe stroke. A year later, just over 13 months ago, the news of the death of his wife Nathalie Delon, the woman of Spanish origin born as Francine Canovas, the first love and lover always in the shadow, was known. “Alain,” Nathalie said in an interview, “he never told me about her but from time to time I saw a shadow of sadness in her eyes.” She was referring to Romy Schneider. But that is another story.
The truth is that there has been no way to tame Delon. It would seem that he didn’t even understand it. Capable of always raising the greatest of passions and the most dedicated of opprobriums at his pace. Never. Despite whoever weighs and even less now, when time is almost over.
Perhaps a good part of his violently nonconformist creed appears in all its confusion in the film, of which he was the protagonist and producer, chosen by the Cannes Film Festival to honor him. ‘The Other Mr. Klein’, directed by Joseph Losey in 1976, tells the story of a rich art dealer who one day is mistaken for another man of the same name. The first is enriched by the desperation of the persecuted Jews in France back in 1942. The second is precisely one of the persecuted Jews.
With this premise so close to Kafka, the director of ‘The Servant’ insists on making a murky and oppressive fable about the fragility of the human being and about the power of society (in general or in its specific form of State) to harass the individual to the clearest of humiliations. And it is there, in the unleashed, as well as slightly unconscious, vindication of individuality against everything and against any religion, ideology or taboo where Alain Delon became and has always been strong. And there, apparently, it continues.
The award at Cannes was accompanied by controversy, perhaps the same that has always been with him from the beginning until today. In 2013, on France 5, he said “I have nothing against two gays deciding to live together.” But, in his opinion, “that was ‘contra naturam’.” And he continued: “We are here to love and woo a woman, not to flirt with men.” On another occasion, he had no qualms about admitting that he was “in part” in agreement with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s thinking. Furthermore, in November of last year, he declared that he did not consider it sexist to slap a woman. To end up admitting that he had also taken some cake from some woman. And so.
To calm the protests, the general delegate of the festival, Thierry Frémaux, had to come to his defense. “He is not going to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It is a recognition of his career… Every existence is full of contradictions… We are talking about a man who went to war very early and belongs to another generation It is very difficult to judge, with today’s standards, matters that are part of the past,” he said. He added that Delon “is a legendary actor and part of Cannes history.” And point.
Be that as it may, Alain Delon has always claimed for himself the virtue of being him against everything. Probably against nature too. He now makes it clear how, when and with whom he is preparing to live his last moment, not exactly dying, of a life squeezed to the last breath.
