Vigo, Truffaut, Melville and...Woo?

The very idea of a film remake would have likely disgusted Vigo, Truffaut, Godard, and Melville. A film, in their eyes, should be a fresh take on old ideas, bringing new insights and wonderful images onto the screen - but it should also pay simultaneous tribute to those before them who have laid the framework and been the prototype for brilliance. Take, for example, Vigo's stunning L'Atalante (1934), a film that so inspired Francois Truffaut at the impressionable age of 14 that he later made the equally great The 400 Blows. Both were influential in their own right - Vigo's film, the epitome of poetic realism, laid the basic groundwork for film noir and even French New Wave cinema, while Truffaut's film later became the jumping-off point for the New Wave. Both presented wholly original techniques, ideas, and storytelling, but paid homage to the ideas of the greatest artists before them (the Lumiere brothers' influence on Vigo is unmistakable, and the influence of Vigo's films saturate nearly every frame of Truffaut's work).

Take a look at a shot from a scene from L'Atalante:


And then the homage paid to Vigo by Truffaut in The 400 Blows - a film which refrains from being derivative while still honoring the brilliance to come before it:


It's almost exactly the same shot, but into two different movies! Two phenomenal, completely different (well, not completely different) films.

And then I read this, from the AV Club:

"Woo is looking to 'line up A-list talent' to star in English-language remakes of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai and Woo’s own 1989 breakthrough The Killer. That Woo wants to put his own, slow-motion-dove spin on Le Samourai isn’t all that surprising—he’s long spoken of Melville as a huge influence, and he’s openly talked about his desire to remake it."

Admirable as it is to desire to make an homage to the greats to come before you, I literally want to vomit at the thought of a remake of Le Samourai. It is one of my favorite films, a controlled and gorgeous masterpiece, which, much like Psycho before it, has absolutely no need to be remade. It's like saying: "Hey, I just bought a new car, which just so happens to be running perfectly, but I'm going to take it into the shop to have the engine fixed."

If you consider Melville to be one of your influences, Mr. Woo, then I would suggest spitting on Melville's grave before you remake Le Samourai. It would probably be more respectful to him and his work when it's all said and done.