Why I love Alain Delon’s per­for­mance in Roc­co and his Brothers

Luchi­no Vis­con­ti saw an inno­cence in the cat­like beau­ty of Alain Delon that coun­tered the rest of the French actor’s career and char­ac­ter. In his hey­day between the 1960s and ​’80s, Delon had a mag­net­ism that gave him dan­ger­ous pow­ers, as well he knew. ​“I was very, very, very hand­some,” he told GQ in 2018. ​“Women were all obsessed with me.” Direc­tors cast him in parts that exploit­ed those looks to nefar­i­ous ends. His most famous roles ran from cool­ly detached in a trench coat in Jean-Pierre Melville’s stripped-back crime thrillers to down­right mur­der­ous as the orig­i­nal tal­ent­ed Mr Rip­ley in René Clément’s Plein Soleil.

Still alive today at 84, despite suf­fer­ing a stroke last year, his star has fall­en amid homo­pho­bic com­ments and fas­cist lean­ings after he aligned him­self with the Nation­al Front in 2013 – not that this stopped Cannes award­ing him an hon­orary Palme d’Or in 2019. His last big screen out­ing of note was as Julius Cae­sar in 2008’s Aster­ix at the Olympic Games.

Back in the ​’60s, Vis­con­ti tapped into a reser­voir of sim­ple good­ness both times that he cast Delon. The actor pos­sess­es a watch­ful still­ness that often resem­bles a preda­tor siz­ing up its prey. In 1960’s Roc­co and his Broth­ers that same still­ness is used to con­vey a qui­et boy who fades into the back­ground of his ram­bunc­tious fam­i­ly until they need him, at which point his will to mar­tyr­dom knows no ratio­nal bounds.

Roc­co explores the prospects of peas­ant-turned-work­ing-class Ital­ians. The new­ly wid­owed Rosa Paron­di (Kati­na Pax­i­nou) relo­cates with her four sons from a small farm­ing vil­lage in the South to Milan in the North hop­ing for that arche­typ­al dream: a bet­ter life, choos­ing the city where her fifth son lives with his wife. Where Visconti’s lav­ish mas­ter­piece The Leop­ard, made three years lat­er, is all ball­rooms and ban­quets, Roc­co is cramped apart­ments, fac­to­ries, bars, box­ing gyms; rejoic­ing at the sight of snow because it means work shov­el­ling side­walks; using a pop­u­lar scam to find some­where to live.

The film is cen­tred around five broth­ers whose names divide the sto­ry into seg­ments: Vin­cen­zo (Spy­ros Fokas), Simone (Rena­to Sal­va­tori), Roc­co (Delon), Ciro (Max Carti­er), Luca (Roco Vidolazzi). There is not a sta­t­ic minute, only 177 propul­sive ones. The inter­play between black-and-white neo­re­al­ist visu­als and melo­dra­mat­i­cal­ly pas­sion­ate char­ac­ters leads to a dance between the ground­ed and the oper­at­ic, and Nino Rota’s sump­tu­ous score so impressed Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la that he hired him for The God­fa­ther. A stick­ler for detail, Vis­con­ti sets every scene with­in a vivid back­ground, key events of the broth­ers’ lives surge out of minu­ti­ae of their social situations.

Whirl-wind­ing through this male nar­ra­tive is a vir­tu­oso per­for­mance by Annie Girar­dot as Nadia, a beau­ti­ful young sex work­er whose des­tiny inter­twines with the Parondis. Girar­dot is aflame with hell­cat ener­gy from the moment she turns up in the fam­i­ly home, only to escape out of the bath­room win­dow. She is full of wild laugh­ter, sen­su­al­i­ty and rage at the dying of the light. Simone, the family’s great hope for social mobil­i­ty via his box­ing prowess, prompt­ly falls for her, set­ting in motion trag­ic con­se­quences for every­one, most dev­as­tat­ing­ly Nadia herself.

Ele­ments of her most dis­tress­ing scenes were cut for US audi­ences on ini­tial release. Con­sid­er this a trig­ger warn­ing for vio­lence against women. It is tes­ta­ment to the extra­or­di­nary life force that Girar­dot brings to the screen that what you remem­ber isn’t her mis­er­able arc, it’s her laugh. (A wild thing to imag­ine, when all is said and done, is that Girar­dot and Sal­va­tore got married.)

The most beau­ti­ful scene in the film – a reprieve – occurs dur­ing the mid-sec­tion belong­ing to Roc­co. Army ser­vice has tak­en him to a near­by town where he runs into Nadia. Gar­ru­lous and charm­ing as ever, she spir­its him away on a horse-drawn car­riage to have cof­fee in a café. They talk like spir­i­tu­al equals. Her gre­gar­i­ous mask crum­bles. ​“Have faith and have no fear,” he tells her. ​“Have great faith.” She has nev­er been treat­ed so respect­ful­ly by a man before and it caus­es a dif­fer­ent side of her char­ac­ter to bloom. She tastes hope and beau­ty and love. The cat­a­lyst is a qual­i­ty in Alain Delon as Roc­co as he gazes with the eyes of some­one who has great faith.