Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Mr. Klein
1976 · Joseph Losey · Mr. Klein on Sightlines
A Jewish newspaper is delivered to Robert Klein's apartment in Paris in 1942, his name and address printed correctly on the wrapper. That is the whole engine. Everything that follows grows out of a piece of paper that is wrong about nothing except which Robert Klein it means.
Deleuze has a small tool for an object like that. Most things in a film are marks: they sit inside a habit and you read them without effort. A revolver in a drawer means someone will use it. A packed case means a departure. A demark is the object that falls out of its habit and can't be put back. It doesn't deliver a meaning, it starts an interpretation, and the film never lets that interpretation close. Losey puts his demark on a doormat in the first minutes and then waits.
What it interrupts is a business. Klein buys paintings cheap from Jews who need to leave France quickly, and Losey shoots these transactions as transactions: a valuation, a signature, a price agreed with courtesy. Nobody raises their voice. When Deleuze wrote about Losey he grouped him with Stroheim and Buñuel as a naturalist, a director who finds a world of raw appetite under the social surface and then lets his characters slide down it. Deleuze called the slide a line of slope: degradation with a direction and no brake. Losey's earlier films ran that slope inside a single house. Here it runs through an occupied city, and the appetite isn't even passionate. It's a margin.
Then the double. The crystal-image is Deleuze's name for the moment when an actual thing and its virtual double get into a circuit you can't break — reflection and face, present and memory, each lending the other its reality. Losey had been building these since The Servant, where a master and his manservant exchange places by way of staircases and framed mirrors, architecture doing work that dialogue usually does. Accident refined the ellipsis: you are often not told whether what you're watching happened, is remembered, or is being wished. Mr. Klein takes the technique and removes its safety. The second Klein stays virtual for the length of the film. A name and a subscription. A room someone left recently. That refusal is Losey's real invention here: Vertigo gives Scottie a Judy to find, and Losey gives his hunter nothing to catch, so the only substance available to the circuit is Klein's own, and it drains.
The draining is filmed rather than stated. Gerry Fisher's camera prowls interiors that always look freshly vacated, and Deleuze's term fits them exactly: an any-space-whatever, a space that has stopped being the setting for an action and become a feeling on its own account. A dented bed. Green-gray light. Melville's Army of Shadows had already drained Occupied France to a procedural blue-gray; Fisher pushes it toward green and lets the rooms carry what a villain would normally carry.
And Delon. Deleuze separates two kinds of filmed face: the reflecting face, which holds one quality steady across its contour, and the intensive face, where small movements accumulate toward a threshold. Delon had made the reflecting face his property in Le Samouraï — beautiful, sealed, unhurried. Producing Mr. Klein himself, he lets Losey use that mask as a starting position and then applies pressure underneath it, so the composure reads first as elegance, then as moral blankness, then as panic with nowhere to surface. It may be the best thing he ever did, and it works because we arrive already knowing the face.
The plot mechanism is a concept so precise it sounds legal. In Deleuze's account of the action-image, a small-form film works by indices: an act discloses a situation we can't see yet. The sharpest of them is the index of equivocity, where one act belongs to two situations at once. Klein buys a painting. In one situation that is commerce; in the other it is a man establishing that he is not the other Klein. He hires a lawyer, travels, produces documents. Every act is doubled. In 1942 this isn't a formal game. It's the condition of the law: the same gesture means two things, and an office decides which.
Which pulls the powers of the false out of philosophy and into a file. Cinema runs on a working contract with its audience, the sense that the camera testifies, that what is shown was there. Losey withholds the one image that would function as evidence. We never get the shot that settles what Klein is. The administration doesn't need one either, and that symmetry is the film's argument: under Vichy, truth wasn't discovered, it was issued. This is why The Trial sits in the ancestry. Welles gave the movies a grammar for bureaucratic dread, deep-focus corridors and paperwork that damns without accusing. Losey borrows the grammar and drops the nightmare lighting. His officials are pleasant.
His deepest debt is to himself, and Deleuze names it: crystal-decomposition, a world of inherited order that keeps its manners while rotting from inside. Auctions, provenance, good furniture, a country house. In The Servant that rot is private. In Mr. Klein it has a date and a state behind it.
The last movement changes the film's species. Klein stops being able to act at all, and Deleuze's seer replaces the agent: a man who can only look at what he is inside of. The Vél d'Hiv roundup arrives as a crowd filmed as one body, what Deleuze calls a dividual, no longer individuals and not yet statistics. Losey doesn't announce it. He arrives at it, which is why it lands.
One question stays genuinely open, and it's worth carrying into a second viewing: why does Klein keep going? The pursuit is a choice he re-makes, repeatedly, and the film declines to say whether it's vanity, curiosity, or some need to be indicted.
The significance is part historical, part formal. In 1976 French cinema had barely begun to look at Vichy complicity, and this film made the collaborator the protagonist instead of the villain, which is harder to sit through and much harder to dismiss. Formally it proved an identity thriller could be built out of administration alone: no conspiracy, no mastermind, only a category and a clerk. Watch it again and give the first twenty minutes your whole attention, before the newspaper arrives. The verdict is already recorded there.
Concepts in play
- demark — The Jewish newspaper delivered to Klein's Paris apartment, correctly addressed to another Robert Klein — an object that falls out of its customary chain and forces interpretation the film never closes.
- index-of-equivocity — Klein's every act (buying paintings cheap from fleeing Jews, hiring lawyers, producing documents) belongs simultaneously to the situation 'Alsatian art dealer' and 'the other, Jewish Robert Klein' — the same gesture readable in two situations, with an office deciding which.
- hyalosign / crystal-image — The doppelgänger hunt in which 'the harder Klein pursues his shadow-self, the less certain his own substance becomes' — actual and virtual Klein in a circuit that cannot be broken, extending the mirror-and-staircase exchange of identities Losey built in The Servant.
- crystal-decomposition — The ordered bourgeois world of auctions, valuations and polite officials keeping its manners while rotting internally — Losey's Servant/Accident template of glacial upper-class surfaces, here given the date 1942 and a state behind it.
- espace quelconque — Gerry Fisher's camera 'prowling apartments that always seem recently vacated' in wintry greens and grays — rooms that have stopped being settings for action and become pure affect, extending Army of Shadows' drained Occupied-France palette.
- reflexive-vs-intensive-face — Delon 'curdling his own iconography: beauty as a form of moral blankness' — the sealed reflecting mask of Le Samouraï used as a starting position, then pressured into an intensive face of panic that cannot surface.
- entropy / degradation — Klein 'benefits from the misfortunes of those who are ruthlessly persecuted' and slides irreversibly from comfortable complicity to the Vél d'Hiv — the naturalist downward slope Deleuze identified in Losey alongside Stroheim and Buñuel.
- puissances du faux — The film never supplies the image that would settle which Klein is which; complicity is 'rendered as administration', and identity is issued by paperwork rather than discovered — the Kafkaesque grammar borrowed from Welles's The Trial, 'paperwork that damns without accusing'.
- voyant — The final movement, 'among the most implacable in postwar European cinema — arrived at, not announced', in which Klein can no longer act on what he perceives and can only watch the roundup he is inside of.
- dividual — The reconstruction of the Vél d'Hiv roundup, where the persecuted are filmed as a single collective body rather than as individuals — the affective unit the film's whole administrative machinery has been producing.