Forgive me if I talk about Alain Delon ’s face for a minute. In truth, it’s hard not to. Certainly, in the early years of his career, that visage was more than a face; it was an existential fact.
The feline eyes, the elegant cheekbones, the mouth both delicate and full — Delon was often even prettier than his female co-stars, who themselves weren’t exactly chopped liver. Filmmakers and audiences seemed to understand this, and that disruption — the transfer of onscreen physical beauty, and even vulnerability, to the male — created an exciting slipstream of ambiguity. In one of his first major roles, Christine (1958), Delon plays a womanizing Austrian second lieutenant who falls for Romy Schneider’s young singer, and he’s treated as a forlorn object of desire, caught between different women.
When we first meet him, he’s ending a torrid love affair with a married baroness. He meets Schneider’s character when he’s asked to accompany a fellow officer on a date, and the two don’t immediately get along. Her desire, however, charms him and wins him over.
(Delon’s onscreen persona, like Cary Grant’s, often had women pursuing him — not the other way around.) But it’s a doomed romance, as the baroness’s jealous husband soon enters the picture. The film plays off Delon’s fragility.
He feels as if he’s perpetually on the edge of romantic disaster and even death. A reluctant Casanova; a moody, almost passive figure — it’s as though his physical app.