Next to LE CERCLE ROUGE (Melville, 1970), MR. KLEIN is Delon’s greatest film of the 70s, the Canal + restoration so gorgeous that I’m still frustrated I couldn’t rip it to share some images with you. I suspect my external blu-ray drive doesn’t accept 4k and would welcome recommendations for a new one.

Robert Klein (Delon)is an antiques dealer profiting from the difficulties facing in Paris, 1942. We encounter him buying a Dutch master from someone who needs gold to escape in a hurry. He’s ever so apologetic, ‘I’m embarrassed to be buying at these prices’. ‘Then why do you?’ answers the man whom circumstances force to accept the deal. As he’s escorting the client out, the postman delivers a copy of ‘Informations Juives’, the Jewish community newspaper, addressed to him. Cognisant of the dangers this presents, he goes to the police to claim, as in so many Hitchcock narratives, that he’s the wrong man; and this sets a chain of events where as he begins searching for the other, Jewish, Robert Klein, and as the system increasingly begins to treat him as a Jew, he begins to question his own identity, increasingly admires the other Robert Klein, who seems to be loving, resisting, fighting back. By the end he becomes ‘The Other,’ but at great cost, as the film ends with the infamous Vel d’Hiv round up of Parisian Jews, where the French government itself delivered 13, 152 jews to the Germans, who promptly put them on trains to extermination camps. The extent of the French authorities’ collaboration was only beginning to come to light as MR. KLEIN was being released and might account for it not being a hit. It’s an extraordinary film. It took me most of yesterday to see because it’s a film about dread that evokes and makes you feel it, that dread increases and doesn’t let up until the final frame, so I used the pause button a lot, and I wish I hadn’t, a weakness, as one destroys all the filmmakers’ rhythms. I wish I’d seen it on a big screen.

There are many extraordinary scenes in this astonishing film. Reviewers often mention the opening, where a phrenologist measures and pokes a middle-aged woman to deduce whether she will be awarded the ‘not Jewish’ certificate on which her safety depends. I’ll merely highlight another,  a metonym for the film as a whole, a musical number based on the anti-semitic Jud Süs, where performers denigrate jews for the benefit of an audience including Nazi officials, but in which some of the performers are clearly men in drag, no doubt soon to follow the jews into the cattle cars provided by the Nazis. it’s a film full of such portentous moments.