Resurrecting an 'Inferno' that consumed its director

Inferno: 4 stars

September 23, 2010|By Michael Phillips | Movie critic

Cinema was made for dreamers, yet the burden of those dreams can become the stuff of train-wreck legend (or stories of train wrecks, narrowly avoided). "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse" tells you a great deal about what Francis Coppola, his wife Eleanor Coppola and others endured in the making of "Apocalypse Now." "Burden of Dreams" is a diary of the making of Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo." The inspired craziness of Herzog's adventure demanded a movie separate from the real movie.

Those logistically difficult films, in the end, were finished. Henri-Georges Clouzot's "Inferno," like Josef Von Sternberg's "I, Claudius" and a handful of other aborted projects by major directors, was not.

An unlimited Hollywood budget, startling optical effects, a glamorous international star in Romy Schneider under duress and in various degrees of undress: With all that in his corner, how did writer-director Clouzot become so lost in his 1964 film "L'Enfer" ("Inferno"), which never came close to fruition?

The answers lie in a documentary as fantastic as the newly recovered "Inferno" test footage and fragments from its aborted principal photography phase. "Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno" was a hit on the festival circuit and is now receiving a weeklong run at the Siskel Film Center. Anyone interested in cinema, in grand follies and life's unwritten melodies, should see it. For a film about a project that became its creator's prison, it's also oddly liberating — a celebration of one artist's insanity, and a reminder to all creators, as one Clouzot associate puts it in the documentary, to "see your madness through."

Clouzot, the director of "The Wages of Fear" and "Diabolique," was inspired by, among others, Fellini's "81/2" to explore cinematic dreamscapes in a new way with "Inferno." He wrote its 50-page treatment between bouts of insomnia to "dramatize the feeling of anxiety that I have every night," as the eternally pipe-smoking director tells a TV interviewer in one archival segment.

The film's story was simple. Newlyweds Marcel and Odette run a lakeside hotel in France's Auvergne region. Marcel suspects his wife of cheating on him with a hunky auto mechanic. His obsession overtakes him. His mind races. His paranoia and jealousy infect his very being.

Nothing was simple about the way Clouzot and his artistic collaborators went about depicting that obsession. The "real" scenes of "Inferno" were photographed in black and white, with Clouzot's production employing three separate camera crews. Marcel's panic-stricken visions were realized in color. The test footage used so well by this documentary's directors, Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, reveals the degree of nonlinear daring Clouzot was after. Smeared with olive oil, or glitter, there is Schneider, inhaling smoke up her nose while lights and shadows fly around her. There is Serge Reggiani (cast as Marcel), his head blurred and distorted as if stretched beyond human reason by his own green-eyed impulses.

The footage dominating "Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno" is very much of its time, a response to op art and "mod" artistic fads. Yet some of it — a lot of it, in fact — suggests a potential masterwork of a unique intensity. Who knows how a finished version of the picture would've turned out? We do know this: The movie in progress appears to have been the work of a rigidly controlling auteur trying, and very possibly succeeding, to "get with" a freer, bolder New Wave-inspired flight of fancy.

We know this as well: After shooting scads of test footage, principal photography started on location and Clouzot had 20 days to complete his meticulously storyboarded exterior shots before the reservoir by the hotel was to be drained. He responded badly to the deadline. He kept reshooting. Progress was slow; confusion among the three crews ran wild. A key crew person left in a huff. Then, more damagingly, so did leading actor Reggiani. Filming Schneider and female co-star Dany Carrel making out on a speedboat, Clouzot suffered a heart attack. End of scene. End of unfinished film.

Bromberg, the documentary's director and co-writer, is a film collector and historian who one day found himself stuck in a Paris elevator for two hours with Clouzot's widow, Ines. They talked about "Inferno," her late husband's great artistic frustration. She mentioned the 85 cans of film (roughly 13 hours of exposed footage) she had in her possession, unseen for more than 40 years. It's the sort of anecdote cinephiles drool about. Like "Lost in La Mancha" and other chronicles of cinematic challenges unmet, "Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno" finds gold amid the ashes.
