Criterion Collection: Fire Within [DVD] [1963] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Louis Malle made his film when he was 30, after having had great success, because, as he tells it, he suddenly felt that life had no meaning. Nothing mattered, he said, and so he made this film--about an alcoholic writer just released from a drying-out clinic who calmly decides to kill himself--as a way of exorcising his demons and his depression. He was not an alcoholic himself but had a close friend who'd killed himself. In fact, the actor who plays Alain, the marvelous Maurice Ronet, had periodic problems with alcoholism, and at Malle's insistence, lost 40 lbs. to play the part of the existentially despairing hero. The director was so obsessed with the character of Alain that he had Ronet wear many of his (Malle's) clothes and put his personal effects around the rooms Alain inhabited. The shoot was uncomfortably intense for everyone on the set, because it was so personal for Malle as its director, and for Ronet because the character was so close to who he was.

The disturbing fact of this wholly absorbing film is that for some people there is no fix or cure for life. Some have perceived Alain as self-pitying, lazy, or self-obsessed, but look at the café scene where he watches all the people drift breezily by, in twos and threes, chatting, connected to each other, and you can almost feel the excruciating loneliness of the outsider looking in, unable to feel a part. His reaction is to down his cognac, but he knows the booze can no longer dull the pain he feels that he cannot love or be loved. He loathes himself because he cannot locate that essential capacity in himself and death seems to be the only answer. This is the most eviscerating portrayal of alcoholism and man's search for meaning that I've ever seen, and a sad testament to the fact that people do die of loneliness.

Malle was asked if he regained his sense of meaning after he made this film. Yes, he said, I felt very alive, but I also knew my meaning had to come through being connected to other people. And he was.

Louis Malle's The Fire Within (Le feu follet) released in 1963 is a French masterpiece. Yes, I sad it, a masterpiece. Sadly, Louis Malle wasn't as big a name as Godard, Truffuat, Melville, or even Rohmer, that is, until The Criterion Collection, that pinnacle of all film distribution post-VHS since it's inception over 15 years ago, single-handed brought Malle's name to the forefront with it's release of another classic, "Elevator To The Gallows". The re-release made his name as common as the other big three 60's French New Wave auters. As a film buff, I get excited when I go to Criterion's website and see what is coming soon to DVD. They are the gold standard of film. I missed "Elevator From The Gallows" when it was first released, so when "The Lovers" and "The Fire Within" were released simultaneously with the cool cover art I quickly jumped on it. Both films were great but I enjoyed "The Fire Within" to such an extent that I watched it over and over and over throughout the week. "The Fire Within", considered to be in the French New Wave genre, could quite easily be placed in the "Poetic Realism" category with it's poetic similarity to 1930s & mainly 1940s work of Rene Clement, esp "Forbidden Games", and Marcel Carne, whose "Children Of Paradise", arguably the greatest French film and one of the most poetic films ever made by a LARGE studio. I feel extremely fortunate that Criterion exists, in that it opens my eyes to films which I otherwise would not be able to experience. And, of the hundreds of 5 star films they have released, "The Fire Within" ranks up there as one of the greatest.

Disturbing story about a man approaching 30 who is hospitalized in mental institution. What seems to be a drinking problem has much deeper roots in this troubling person. He has friends, many of them scattered all over Paris. They are mostly artists he has known since he was very young. Long ago they had their adventures together, the usual stuff; drinking, drugs, women, parties. But now they are more or less settled in teh routine of ordinary lives. They are married, with or without children and pursue their youthful dreams more as a sidekick to their day job(s). They have replaced their dreams with responsibilities of paying the bills, raising children or selling commercial art. He is lost: his marriage to an American woman named Dorothy is falling apart, his writing career is going nowhere, and his handsome looks cannot compensate for his feelings of sexual inadequacy. In the world of adolescence lost, he is unable to make transformation of his own and that makes him deeply troubled and depressed. His friends are amazing: accessible, understanding, compassionate and non-judgemental. But that does not seem to be enought. I absolutely loved this movie, becuase I believe that in the point of any adult's life there must have been moment(s) when we all felt so helpless and alone in the world the way this man feels throughout the entire movie. It is wonderful to see Jeanne Moreau in the role of his woman/painter/artist friend whose refuge from the world is drugs (hashish). Maurice Ronet's performance of a man lost is stunning.