#430: MALLE, Louis: The Fire Within (1963)

MALLE, Louis (France)

The Fire Within [1963]

Spine #430
DVD

After garnering international acclaim for such seminal crowd-pleasers as The Lovers and Zazie dans le métro, Louis Malle gave his fans a shock with The Fire Within, a penetrating study of individual and social inertia. Maurice Ronet (Elevator to the Gallows), in an implosive, haunted performance, plays Alain Leroy, a self-destructive writer who resolves to kill himself and spends the next twenty-four hours trying to reconnect with a host of wayward friends. Unsparing in its portrait of Alain's inner turmoil and shot with remarkable clarity, The Fire Within is one of Malle's darkest and most personal films.

108 minutes
Black & White

Monaural

in French

1:66:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2008

Director/Writers

Louis Malle was 31 when he wrote and directed The Fire Within.
Based on a novel by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.

Other Malle films in the Collection:

429: The Lovers (1958)
#335: Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
#570: Zazie Dans le Métro (1960)
Eclipse Series 2: Vive le Tour (1962)
Eclipse Series 2: Phantom India (1969)
Eclipse Series 2: Calcutta (1969)
#328: Murmur of the Heart (1971)
Eclipse Series 2: Humain, Trop Humain (1973)

#329: Lacombe, Lucien (1974)
Eclipse Series 2: Place de la République (1974)

#571: Black Moon (1975)

#479: My Dinner with André (1981)
Eclipse Series 2: God's Country (1985)
Eclipse Series 2: . . . And the Pursuit of Happiness (1986)

#330: Au Revoir les Enfants (1987)
#599: Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)

The Film

Going through an intense period of self-doubt (but not particularly suicidal), Malle became inspired by la Rochelle's 1931 novel, Le feu follet, which itself was inspired by the bizarre pseudo-surrealist, Jacques Rigaut, who commited suicide at age 30, using a ruler to correctly measure the bullet's trajectory to his heart.

A talent as fluid as Malle can probably fail to create something cinematically interesting, so one must appreciate this film for its merits: the spot-on use of Eric Satie's piano pieces (Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes), the beautiful chiaroscuro black and white, the wonderful jump cuts during Alain (Maurice Ronet)'s crisis of confidence ... in short, a beautiful film about suicide.

The Extras

The Booklet

Twenty-four page booklet featuring essays by critic Michel Ciment and film historian Peter Cowie.

Ciment:

"Malle repeatedly said that The Fire Within was the first of his films to satisfy him totally. It's also probably the one that worked as an exorcism and liberated him from his former persona, that of a young man living at night, having brief encounters, and blessed with an easy existence and (at least to his eyes) undeserved professional successes. At the age of thirty, and facing the same existential issues as Alain, Malle was giving an opposite answer, throwing away what he hated in himself and clearing the way for a quest of perfection and his love of life."

Cowie (on Ronet):

"If ever an actor could reconcile his natural-born swagger with a kind of pervasive lethargy it was Maurice Ronet. This gave him a distinctive presence in the French cinema for more than twenty years, even if he eschewed the lure of stardom per se, preferring parts that suggested rather than stated a character's intentions. In The Fire Within (1963) Louis Malle found in the sexy, exasperating Ronet an alter ego, just as Truffaut had found his Léaud, and Godard his Belmondo, confessing many years later, 'There was a strange osmosis between us.'"

Commentary

None.

Archival interviews

With director Malle and actor Ronet.

Malle’s Fire Within

A video program featuring interviews with actor Stewart and filmmakers Phillippe Collin and Volker Schlödorff.

Jusqu’au 23 juillet

A 2005 documentary short about the film and its source novel, Le feu follet, by la Rochelle, featuring actor  Mathieu Amalric, writer Didier Daenickx, and Cannes festival curator Pierre-Henri Deleau.

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