L’Enfer [Hell] **** (1994, Emmanuelle Béart, François Cluzet, Nathalie Cardone, Jean-Pierre Cassel) – Classic Movie Review 2360

Director Claude Chabrol tries to make belated amends for the way the French New Wave he was part of attacked the work of Henri-Georges Clouzot, the director of Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques, by finally making a movie of the screenplay of the film L’Enfer that Clouzot was forced to abandon through ill health in 1963.

Clouzot’s lead actor Serge Reggiani fell ill one week after shooting began and had to be replaced. Then Clouzot also became ill during production, which led doctors and insurance agents to order the production stopped.

In 1994, Chabrol adapted Clouzot’s screenplay that examines the sexual jealousy of a man towards his flirtatious wife, whose psychological state informs everything with desire. François Cluzet plays Paul Prieur, an irritable and stressed-out French country hotel manager, who becomes obsessively jealous of every man who comes into contact with his beautiful wife Nelly, played by Emmanuelle Béart.

And so the dream family life of the apparently perfect young married couple turns into a nightmare. The innkeeper begins to develop paranoid delusions about his wife’s infidelity. He starts to spy on his wife, he succumbs to jealousy and madness, his life starts to crumble and his jealousy finally erupts, as expected, in tragic violence.

Chabrol moves the intelligently constructed thriller along tensely and tautly, with sharp editing, a well-built atmosphere of mystery and nerve jangling suspense sequences, while at the same time developing the theme of one man’s torment and self-destruction through jealousy. This brings needed tension and excitement to a script that’s full of psychological truths but with little in the way of actual thrills.

The portrait of a man on the verge in very convincing, even if the character is too extreme to gain full sympathy and might be found hard to identify with. Cluzet makes him a charmless individual, and you do wonder what Béart would see in him and why she would stay in this emotional hell.

But Chabrol turns it into a film that’s persuasively engrossing and a magnetically compelling study in obsession. And it makes a worthy and respectful tribute to the great Clouzot, whose reputation was ironically rescued by the Americans, a reversal of the way the French established the reputation of American directors and Hitchcock, whose work is in the same area as Clouzot’s.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2360

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