• Monsieur Klein

9/6/24 (Fri)

Joseph Losey’s 1976 film is another identity-challenging work reminiscent of his intriguing The Servant. A successful art dealer in Vichy Paris runs a thriving sideline buying up art on the cheap from Jewish collectors desperate for cash to escape the country. One day a Jewish newspaper arrives at his door addressed to him. Assuming that he’s been mistaken for someone with the same name, he goes to the police. It turns out that the other Klein is wanted by the police, and the art dealer’s efforts to convince them that he’s not the Jewish Klein only prompt suspicions that he’s trying to throw them off the track. This marks the beginning of a Kafkaesque spiral ending in a concentration camp.

I would think the answer to Klein’s dilemma is right in his pants, the opposite of the Jewish kid’s much more difficult attempt to pretend to be a goy in Europa Europa. Nevertheless, he is required to present documents proving his ancestry (his incensed father: “We’ve been French and Catholic since Louis XIV!”), but bureaucratic torpor makes that difficult. Meanwhile, he becomes obsessed in uncovering the mysterious Klein who has for unknown reasons pinned his identity on him. He manages to gain access to the man’s shabby abandoned apartment, meets random people that knew him, crashes a party in a fancy estate in the guise of the other man hoping to find info on him. Yet none of the numerous clues and encounters bring him any closer. The contradictions of a man who lives in such low digs while mingling with such high society make him all the more elusive.

Several odd coincidences seem to tie the Kleins more closely together than we had assumed, and their identities appear to intertwine: he is mistaken for his doppelgänger in a photo, the dog that belonged to the other Klein follows him home, the same book, Moby Dick, is found in both his and the other Klein’s apartment in what appears an explicit reference to the Ahab-like search that leads similarly to his own destruction. He looks continually at himself in mirrors, as if trying to verify to himself who he is. He actually takes on a new identity at one point, securing a fake passport under an assumed name and boarding a train that will take him to freedom. However, his crazed determination to find his namesake leads him to jump off at the last minute.

In the end, unable to prove his identity, he is rounded up with thousands of other Jews in the infamous Vélodrome d’Hiver incident in July 1942. His lawyer brings him the needed documents in the nick of time, but Klein unexpectedly ignores these in his mad quest for the real Jewish Klein. He is juxtapositioned in one frame with a woman who we met at the very beginning of the film when a doctor was clinically checking her nude body – teeth, facial features, body shape, gait – for signs of Jewishness. (He had judged her status uncertain at that point, but this scene shows his ultimate conclusion.) We last see Klein on a train headed to Auschwitz, boxed in ironically with a man whose art he had coldly acquired early in the film. The smug dealer has joined the ranks of the unknown, without even a unique name of his own. It is not even clear whether he recognizes his own role in the regime’s treatment of its Jewish citizens, only to become the victim of it. The mystery of the other Klein is appropriately never resolved.

This is not the glamorous town that we’re used to: Paris has never looked so bleak and empty, with the exception of that last horrifying scene. The claustrophobic feel of the mystery Klein’s grubby room is especially impressive. Alain Delon, who is rarely off the screen, is a strong presence, though maybe a bit too dispassionate in his descent into madness (compare with Robert De Niro’s crazed portrayal in Taxi Driver, which beat this film for the top award at Cannes). The film apparently didn’t do well in its initial outing, which some have blamed on the unwillingness of French viewers to acknowledge an uncomfortable part of their history that was still then well in living memory for many. Time has proven its worth. An incisive and fascinating work.