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Fires Within: Two by Louis Malle on Criterion
The Stop Smiling DVD Review
(Criterion)
Monday, June 02, 2008
The Lovers (1958)
The Fire Within (1963)
Directed by Louis Malle
(Criterion)
Reviewed by Mark Asch
There’s a sense, in the early films of Louis Malle, of an expensive education at play — of a connoisseur rifling through people and their ideas, habitats and possessions; through LPs by Miles Davis, Brahms and Erik Satie; through film genres and classical and au courant style, with the ease of one at leisure to acquire and relish his tastes.
The Lovers (1958) is a drama of infidelity and class-conscious study of manners and mores, but Dijon housewife Jeanne Tournier’s (Jeanne Moreau) sensual awakening and deliverance from domestication unfolds like a parable over an after-dinner glass of brandy, the symbolism enjoyably obvious beginning with the opening scene at a polo match (for which wild animals are trained to be the playthings of the rich). Unattended by her, bourgeois husband Henri (Alain Cuny), Jeanne spends ever more time with her Parisian friend Maggy (Judith Magre), who breakfasts in bed with her lapdog, and who introduces her to the gallant polo player Raul Flores (José Luis de Villalonga). An arch triangle is sketched in pointed doublespeak and whispered declaration, but the melodrama is interrupted when Jeanne’s car breaks down en route back home to a dinner with her husband, lover and friend, and she hitches a ride with earthy, callused scholar Bernard (Jean-Marc Bory). Malle acknowledges the contrivance, arranging Henri, Raul and Maggy in Bernard’s windshield as he and Jeanne come up the drive — a spry frame-within-a-frame, from a movie Jeanne is now watching instead of starring in. She and Bernard flirt by talking about her husband as if he were a brown bear, absurdly trained for civil society; Bernard stays for dinner, and a bat flies in through the window.
At the dinner table in the drawing rooms, Malle holds class difference and romantic cross purposes in the same frame — occasionally in charged, formal tableaus, but more often in Renoir’s casual, even jokey manner. Malle has a cultured vocabulary, mockingly fluent in whatever tongue is called for. The Lovers becomes mystical after dinner, when Jeanne lets her hair down and, dressed in white like a bride, steps out into an enchanted day-for-night, all nature suddenly audible on the soundtrack. The interlude is mystical, shot (by Henri Decaë) in a soft-focus glow, and surreal — her inevitable meeting with Bernard is clinched when both set their glasses down together, clinking them together like a church bell’s chime. Jeanne’s (practically literal) flowering involves a float down the river in the rowboat — a hushed sequence witnessed by god’s creatures great and small, a return to the natural state not unlike one in the then-recent Night of the Hunter, here representing not Edenic purity but living sensuality. (A song of innocence rather than experience.)
Jeanne and Bernard reenter her house through the servants’ door. Their climactic sex scene was controversial in its day — Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” formulation for obscenity in fact springs from the Supreme Court’s overturning of a fine leveled against an Ohio theater manager for exhibiting the film — but now seems playful, mostly a matter of Moreau and Bory’s coltish nuzzling. Malle broke ground almost by accident; he seems mostly interested in the pleasure they take in each other’s bodies.
****
If The Lovers is attuned to the self-knowledge dawning across Moreau’s face, The Fire Within (1963) keeps ragged pace with the hunted Maurice Ronet, who, as the reformed hell-raiser Alain Leroy, seems to disintegrate before our eyes. All sobered up with no place go at a Versailles clinic, Alain’s a writer who can no longer write, except for a date marked on his mirror: July 23, the day the film’s action takes place and the date chosen for his suicide.
He leaves his room, full of baroque décor, clothes (Malle’s real-life wardrobe), snapshots, macabre news clippings, knickknacks, a chessboard, stacks of books — the lingered-over possessions collected in The Lovers’ library, walk-in closets and liquor cabinets recast as suffocating — and heads to Paris to say adieu to all those old friends, old haunts and old times. He feels oceans apart from his current lover, his treatment sterilizes him, his former comrades are dispersed. An old running mate, married and working on an academic treatise, tries to talk him out of suicide, but Alain rejects his productivity and domesticity as mediocre and complacent; an old girlfriend’s (Moreau) circle of druggy nihilists are merely numbed posers; the quixotic quests of aging radicals and nostalgic tall tales are ugly and false.
The Fire Within is, in the best way, all talk: the two-person dialogues aren’t heady and dialectic a la Godard but philosophical musings with literary flourishes, and taking place in jump-cut sidewalk cafes or street markets, underlit opium dens choked with statues and tapestries or ultramodern dinner parties, early-morning hotel bars or late-night city buses. Malle’s generous materialism here seems more like spiritual hunger. In the wee small hours, Alain pours out his desire to love and be loved, dazzle and be dazzled. Throughout, Leroy’s eye and Ghislain Cloquet’s camera wander, ogling girls never to be seen again.
When Leroy returns to the clinic, he packs as if for a journey — against the current, ceaselessly into the past. He puts down The Great Gatsby and shoots himself through his hungry heart. Superimposed on Alain’s face, in the last image of the film, is his suicide note (to his American wife, conspicuously absent throughout, or to the world?): “I’m killing myself because you didn’t love me, because I didn’t love you. Because our ties were loose, I’m killing myself to tighten them. I leave you with an indelible stain.”
Desperate to burn at both ends, to connect and create, frustrated with inadequacy and at war with self-doubt and stasis (though his death on the battlefield is far more romantic than any in Godard, or even Truffaut), Alain is restless; so too is the then-30-year-old Malle. It’s this restlessness that marks a versatile young filmmaker’s connection with the ravenousness of the Nouvelle Vague — for which “the fire within” could have been a battle cry.
