Mr Klein (1976)

Amazing how the best films speak to the moment whenever they are viewed. 

I watched Joseph Losey’s Mr Klein (1976) the day France voted with a near-majority of the UN Security Council to require Israel soon to vacate the “occupied” West Bank without any assurance that its genocidal neighbour enemies won’t use the advantage to destroy her — as they frequently threaten. 

Of course, the “occupied” refers to parts of Judea, Sumeria and Jerusalem that were included in the Jewish state of Palestine that the League of Nations committed to 90 years ago and that the UN later confirmed. Israel, that is, is declared to be “occupying” its own land and is required to leave it, even after Jordan was carved out of it earlier and the “Palestinians” — the term hijacked by Arafat for refugees not just from Israel but from Jordan and Egypt— have consistently refused their additional portion of that land since 1947 if it meant peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state. 

The UNSC motion would also have violated the 1967 armistice, under which Israel would improve its security by keeping some of the land retaken in that defensive war and returning some in exchange for peace treaties with its antagonistic neighbours. For peace with Egypt they returned the Sinai, which is bigger than the present Israel. The Palestinians have refused to negotiate peaceful coexistence. When Israel vacated Gaza in 2005 the Palestinians in effect had their new state. Instead of proving peaceful partners they launched relentless rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and built an aggressive tunnel network into Israel school grounds.  

Of course Israel’s self-defence is always translated into aggression. The term “disproportionate” has been twisted to condemn Israel for Palestinian casualties despite her unprecedented efforts to reduce them by warning of attacks, restraint from firing back, and especially Hamas’s hiding its weapons and soldiers among civilians, eager to spend their own peoples’ lives to stigmatize Israel. 

As France suffers increasingly numerous and violent incidents of antisemitism, causing a dramatic increase in French Jews’ fleeing to Israel, the government mouths its disapproval. After all, France has welcomed the Jews since Napoleon in 1806 mandated their acceptance if they behaved as Frenchmen first. But the true spirit of the nation seems closer to the Dreyfuss affair and to the senior diplomat who within the last decade went unpunished for declaring Israel “that shitty country” at a London soiree. This is the France Losey plumbs in Mr Klein. The film was made in 1976, but set in occupied Paris in 1942, but still serves as a barometer of the anti-Jewish pressure in 2014. 

Robert Klein (Alain Delon) is a handsome happy Paris bachelor, at least a third-generation Catholic, with a posh flat and furniture, obvious wealth and social status, enjoying the gentile’s privilege of buying the valuable art and antiques from doomed Jews at cut-rate prices. His affair with his lawyer’s wife is briefly suspended for a younger live-in. 

Klein’s complacency is shaken when a Jewish newspaper arrives addressed to him. The film shows his attempts to avoid misidentification as a Jew, to distinguish himself from a Jew with the same name. The more the hero tries to distance himself from the Jews the more he becomes entangled in their fate. He’s even adopted by the other Klein’s dog (a German shepherd, of course). By the time the documents that would clear him of the Jews’ doom arrive he is swept into a boxcar to the gas chambers. 

     In the film’s opening scene a French doctor brutishly examines a naked woman who is trying to prove herself Aryan. She is nakedly doing what Delon’s character will spend the film stylishly doing — denying any connection to Jewishness. The doctor’s verdict is not assuring, however, which she keeps from her husband (as he does his from her). In the last scene there is a possibility that Klein is accepting his fate. He may be going with the flow of doomed Jews as throughout the film he went with the flow of the antisemites. His “I’ll be back” is not just a naive promise to his lawyer but the larger warning that his period’s and his culture’s antisemitism will find a way to return. In any case, this Mr Klein is a man whose culture and decency did not keep him from collaborating with the persecution and the annihilation of the Jews. He remains a man for our seasons too.