Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind (1977)

The great­est shot in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind isn’t the big ol’ glit­ter­ball moth­er­ship final­ly park­ing up on Earth to per­form its daz­zling prog rock light show. It’s not loon­bag Richard Drey­fus build­ing a giant ter­mite mound in his liv­ing room (couldn’t he have done that out­side?), the result of an image plant­ed into his sub­con­scious that con­sumes his wak­ing hours.

The shot can be found ear­ly on in the film, dur­ing a sequence in which a group of what appear to be para­nor­mal sci­en­tists are try­ing to explain away a mir­a­cle – a fleet of World War Two fight­er planes that, for decades, were con­sid­ered miss­ing, have re-appeared in the Sono­ran Desert. Uphold­ing the stan­dards of their trade they search for any pos­si­ble answer, but remain ful­ly aware of the excit­ing inter­galac­tic ram­i­fi­ca­tions if they don’t hap­pen to find one.

The lead sci­en­tist, Claude Lacombe, is played by none-oth­er than French new wave direc­tor, François Truf­faut – a rare but valu­able late career run-out as an actor. His char­ac­ter is not entire­ly dis­sim­i­lar to the one he plays in his own Day for Night from 1973, a har­ried movie direc­tor attempt­ing to cor­ral peo­ple towards the col­lec­tive goal of cre­at­ing art.

There is a lone wit­ness to this ​“event”, an elder­ly his­pan­ic gen­tle­man who has a real bad case of sun­burn. Lacombe is intro­duced to this man who is sat on a bench. He looks con­fused, not real­is­ing what has hap­pened or what he has seen. Lacombe kneels down to the lev­el of the wit­ness so he can look him in the eye. His first ges­ture isn’t a scowl or an angry bark – the cin­e­mat­ic clich­es of mod­ern inter­ro­ga­tion. He offers a soft smile and quick­ly wins the affec­tions of this con­fused gentleman.

This isn’t a big, beam­ing, sen­ti­men­tal smile, the kind which would sug­gest that Lacombe is pity­ing the man, or worse, pro­fil­ing him, dis­miss­ing him as a mad old fool. It’s a small, gen­tle half-smile, the type which betrays hon­esty and earns instant empa­thy. The man knows it’s okay to talk, to reveal exact­ly what it is he saw. But maybe the smile is some­thing else? Is it Lacombe real­is­ing that this is it, the moment where his life’s work sud­den­ly meets with some kind of clo­sure, or at least pass­es on to an unex­pect­ed new phase. It’s a smile of accord, but also of bare­ly-con­cealed enthusiasm.

This may seem like an triv­ial ges­ture, but it it fact tees up much of what the film ends up being about. Lacombe com­mu­ni­cates through a trans­la­tor (played by Bob Bal­a­ban) and Close Encoun­ters is a work which asks if we can con­nect with oth­er peo­ple – oth­er beings – in a way which tran­scends lan­guage. Unlike so many oth­er movies about alien vis­i­ta­tion, this is a rare exam­ple of one which espous­es friend­li­ness over aggres­sion. Its sim­ple mes­sage is that it is always bet­ter to begin a con­ver­sa­tion with a smile.