Claude Chabrol’s “L’Enfer” is a great movie thriller about a man driven mad by jealousy-or, perhaps, driven into jealousy by madness. Potently, unforgettably, it shows us a French provincial Othello who’s also his own Iago, and a lovable, piteous Desdemona who may be entirely innocent-or may not.
The title translates as “Hell” and that’s exactly where the film-an inferno of insanity and desire, rage and cruelty, a torture chamber of convulsive nightmare-takes us, as we watch a fragile world splinter and come apart.
The movie, oddly, is a posthumous collaboration between the French cinema’s acknowledged masters of suspense: the late Henri-Georges Clouzot (“Diabolique,” “The Wages of Fear”) and Claude Chabrol-two filmmakers who, at various times, with varying accuracy, were both called the “French Hitchcock.”
Clouzot wrote the screenplay three decades ago with Belgian novelist Jose-Andre Lacour, partially shot it in 1964, then abandoned the project due to illness. Chabrol reworked and modernized Clouzot’s first draft (not the one partially shot). From it, he’s shaped one of the most eerily disturbing and mesmerizingly powerful films of his entire career-or, for that matter, of Clouzot’s.
“L’Enfer” has flaws. But it also has some of the transforming, transfixing quality of the best art. It creates its own world, alters our angle of vision. “L’Enfer” is a cool film about hot blood. But Chabrol-working at his peak-doesn’t keep us distanced from his protagonist, Paul (Francois Cluzet), a mediocre French resort hotelier, who marries the region’s loveliest woman, Nelly (Emmanuelle Beart), only to suspect her of adultery.
Chabrol pulls us inside Paul’s head, into his wild, feverish suspicions, his anxiety and torment. Outside Paul’s hell, there’s a real world on the periphery of his obsession: his hotel on the Lac de St. Ferreol, enclosed in its sunny bucolic landscape of lakes, beaches and tree-latticed walks, full of amusingly humdrum or eccentric guests (including Jean-Pierre Cassel, the nasty divorce saboteur in Chabrol’s 1970 “La Rupture”).
But inside, hell rages. We see much of “L’Enfer” as Paul does; off-kilter, over-heated, drenched with lust and guilt. And we’re outside as well. We watch his first faint suspicions of cuckoldry grow into fury, despair and finally an enveloping nightmare. We can feel him sinking into chaos.
From the start, Chabrol is careful to alert us to Paul’s distorted viewpoint. Distortions are woven seamlessly into the whole narrative style-as they were in Chabrol’s “Les Biches,” “La Rupture” and “Ten Day’s Wonder”-and, at the end, there are two separate climaxes, both shocking. Which is “real”? (Either?)
It’s part of this film’s brilliance that we’re kept on edge throughout, unsure of what we’re really seeing, uncertain of how much is truly happening. It’s like a detective story with a mad detective. Can we trust the “solution”? The movie spans years, from Paul and Nelly’s nuptials, though their marriage, the birth of their child, and finally the onset and growth of his idee fixe. But it’s deliberately circular, a cul-de-sac with no exit or escape. “L’Enfer’s” horrific last shot exactly echoes its lyrical first.
It’s plainly crucial that Nelly be played by an actress who could believably drive men mad with jealousy. And that’s one of “L’Enfer’s” triumphs. Clouzot’s 1964 choice was young Romy Schneider, the royal sex kitten of German and Italian cinema. (Serge Reggiani was cast as her husband; briefly, Jean-Louis Trintignant replaced him.) Here, as played by Beart-the vendettist of “Manon of the Spring” and the model of “La Belle Noiseuse”-Nelly is shockingly beautiful.
Watching Beart’s childlike angelic face and piquant body, her glorious glistening eyes, we can see why Paul becomes unhinged. Beart’s Nelly is the kind of woman-bright, delightfully flirtatious, warmly generous and vivacious, both teasing and somewhat submissive, deliberately “girlish”-that a much less self-assured mediocrity like Paul, more afraid of the world Nelly embraces radiantly, would go nuts over. Nelly seems a dream come true-which is part of why Paul becomes convinced it’s a false dream, a trick.
Francois Cluzet, who plays Paul, specializes in playing obsessive or ineffectual types. He was the driven jazz fan of “Round Midnight” and the hapless husband of “Olivier, Olivier.” Here, with his dark angular face, nervousness and haunted eyes, he’s obsessive and ineffectual. We can sense Paul feels unworthy of Nelly-and he’s right. And though some may complain that he’s too clownish to be terrifying, they’re looking for cliches. In life, the greatest monsters-right on up to Hitler, Idi Amin and Stalin-are often clowns as well.
Claude Chabrol is often considered to be two decades past his peak years: the late ’60s-early ’70s when he made “Les Biches,” “Le Boucher,” “Wedding in Blood” and a half dozen others. But, as far as I’m concerned, Chabrol’s great period is now. Considering his 1970 “La Femme Infidele” as “obviously” superior to “L’Enfer” may be like calling Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 “The 39 Steps” “obviously” better than his 1958 “Vertigo” (which is what ’50s reviewers did think.)
How many world filmmakers in the past six or seven years have matched Chabrol’s output? “The Story of Women,” “Madame Bovary” and “Betty” are superb films and so is his little-seen 1993 “The Eye of Vichy” which, in some ways, is a more stirring and revelatory documentary on Vichy France than “The Sorrow and the Pity.”
At 64, with over 50 films behind him, Chabrol is the most prolific of all his old New Wave colleagues-which included his special chums Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer (“my gang,” he once called their trio) plus Jacques Rivette and the late Francois Truffaut. But it’s a mistake to regard Chabrol as less creative, to see his propensity for adaptations of thriller writers (Charlotte Armstrong, Ellery Queen, Georges Simenon) and classic novelists (Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Simone de Beauvoir, Henry Miller) as evidence of unoriginality. Like the great Hollywood auteurs-Howard Hawks, Hitchcock and John Ford-he and his Cahiers du Cinema comrades championed, Chabrol can become most himself when immersed in the text of another. Exactly the result here of his posthumous collaboration with Clouzot.
The misanthropic Clouzot worked over the script obsessively to begin with, twisted and tortured it. He might have made the film too heavy. Chabrol’s lighter touch and comic flair bring out the story’s deepest meanings, the terrifying tenderness at the core of its horror. The scorchingly pretty landscapes suggest the sweet mockery Paul senses. And the central story-about a “charming couple” gone hideously wrong-all but sears the heart.
What about the deepest mystery? Why do Paul and Nelly stick together? Why no revolt? Perhaps because, in a twisted way, they’re “good citizens”: faithful, responsible bourgeosie. (Nelly is initially amused and flattered by Paul’s jealousy.) That’s the core of this film’s vision of hell, the absolute madness of a society that keeps averting its eyes, ignoring the obvious, trying to preserve its veneer. The resolution of “L’Enfer”-among the bleakest, saddest and most terrifying in any modern film-is like a last stop for obsession and madness. There, in the cold light of day, we see how deeply into hell one can descend.
”L’ENFER”
(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)
Directed by Claude Chabrol; written by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jose-Andre Lacour, Chabrol; photographed by Bernard Zitzerman; edited by Monique Fardoulis; sets by Emile Ghigo; music by Matthieu Chabrol; produced by Marin Karmitz. An MK2 Productions USA release; opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre. Running time: 1:40. MPAA rating: R. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.
THE CAST
Nelly……………………………………Emmanuelle Beart
Paul…………………………………….Francois Cluzet
Marylin………………………………….Nathalie Cardone
Dr. Arnoux……………………………….Andre Wilms
Martineau………………………………..Marc Lavoine
M. Vernon………………………………..Jean-Pierre Cassel
