Clouzot's Inferno Still Hot

L'Enfer (The Inferno, dirs. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea)
was to be Henri-Georges Clouzot's most ambitious film and the triumph of his career. It ended up being one of the great debacles of the years before Ishtar, Water World, and The Adventures of Pluto Nash. It began with a drama about jealousy that Clouzot wanted to direct in colors that reflected the intensity of that emotion. It ended when Clouzot collapsed from a heart attack while shooting in a boat on a French lake.  At least he lived to endure the pain of never completing Inferno.
A lot of Inferno was shot, but Clouzot never finished it. Now Serge Bromberg has reconstructed sections of it and told the story of the ultimate backstage drama - a dream team project that burned and crashed. The doc premiered at Cannes, played at the Toronto International Film Festival, and is now at the New York Film Festival.  It's not clear who will distribute the film, but it will certainly come to American theaters. It is not to be missed.
Inferno is the story of Marcel Prieur (Serge Reggiani), a middle-aged man managing a lake-side hotel in the Cantal region in the center of France.  Marcel has a young beautiful wife, Odette (Romy Schneider), and he develops a feverish obsession that she is having an affair with Martineau (Jean-Claude Bercq), a beefy mechanic who operates a garage nearby. Shake well and serve.    
Don't be fooled by the blitheness of French sex comedies from the 1970's that the French don't care about adultery, even though they practice it with great frequency. The pain of jealousy was the bread and butter of the nouveau roman, the minimal, expressionless novel of the 1950's and early 1960's. For Clouzot, jealousy would be a far greater hell than he imagined.
Bromberg, a film restorer who co-directed with Ruxandra Medrea, takes us through the beguiling world of French cellu-rati. Schneider was on her way to becoming one of the biggest European stars. Reggiani was a popular singer. Clouzot was at his peak. The cast was rounded out with sex-kitten Dany Carrel and Bercq.
But Clouzot had great ambitions to find a new cinematic language for the explosive and corrosive emotions in the script. He wanted the lake to turn red while the allegedly cheating couple were out water-skiing. His crew explains how that was done. He wanted bodies to change colors and drew on the op-art and visual effects of the time to achieve that. We hear from his crew, which included Costa-Gavras, on how that happened back in 1964. We also get readings of the scrip from an actor and actress. Let's just say that Clouzot was on to something, and we have the footage to prove it. At first the experimentation seems campy and amateurish, but you're drawn in to Marcel's paranoia, which Clouzot makes credible by turning Schneider from an obliging housewife into a sexually radiant figure. You're never sure whether it's real or Marcel's obsession.  That's how jealousy works, and Clouzot was putting it all on film.
The project ended up destroying itself, even though Hollywood was eager to get it for America. Reggiani fled the set, and Clouzot was stricken with a heart attack. Without its male star, the film couldn't be resumed, even though Clouzot tried.
Inferno shows us that cinema, like drama, is about emotion. If a director can get the emotions right, the technology at any level can be put in the service of his mission. Inferno got too close to the limits of its team in the course of creating an extraordinary achievement, and burned itself on the way there. Lots of movies destroy the people making commercial trash. The rehab centers of Southern California are evidence enough of that. Assessing whether the sacrifices of Inferno would have been worth it requires a lot more thought. See Bromberg's documentary, and you'll be thinking about just that.   

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