Louise Malle

There are many obvious reasons why someone could be effected by this movie, its existential, its dark, its French, but there was something beyond these elements that I found striking. Malle manages to forge an unfamiliar sense of the everyday. Objects are dissociated, people watching from café’s are more than ever, obviously strangers, without history.

There are moments when the camera closes in on the face, and you can see, deeply the heavy mascara of the 1960’s cosmetic. But what I find so terribly sad about these moments is the incredible lack of intimacy, as if the gaze were never met with an actual look. As if you could feel the desperation of clutching for a lover’s arm and at the same time feel as if its already wriggled away.

 Still, no matter how personal the camera gets to the expression, I am pulled through the movie as if I were its shadow. Somehow watching makes me even more isolated. There is little interiority from Ronet’s character. Our impressions of him are his basic confessions, his routine, but most importantly his relation to the things which surround him, the space he occupies. In this, I think Malle does something genius. There are no over worked settings, spared of any elaborate design. Its Ronet’s awkwardness, his inability to take possession, to really hold something that fully expresses his solitude. 

 

 

Basic Information

            My favorite new French director originally studied political science at the Sorbonne. Although he filmed in the time of Godard and Truffaut, he’s not associated with elements of the nouvelle vague aesthetic. Malle made his first feature “Elevator to the Gallows” at age 24, going on to make “The Lovers” whose controversial sexual content became judicial when taken to the Supreme Court. Believed to be too obscene the theater was fined $2500, but because the court could not agree on a definition of obscenity the charges were dropped. Malle made 20 feature films in his life; but my favorite and most recent obsession is “The Fire Within” (Le Feu Follet). Made in 1963 staring Maurice Ronet as suicidal alcoholic Alain Leroy. Based on the novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. It is often regarded as his best from his earlier work because it’s the most autobiographical.

            Interesting facts about the film:

1. Malle made Ronet loose 45 pounds for the role.
2. The wardrobe for the movie was all of Malle’s own clothes. Malle wished he could have played the part, but admitted in an interview in 1992 that he is a terrible actor. As a result of this particular physiological obsession he was particularly hard on Ronet during filming.
3. Louise Malle worked with a close team of friends, whose particular specialties became part democratic and collaborative effort. Le Feu Follet was an entirely different project and became a solitary expression and documentation of his emotional history. He wrote the script alone.
4. The Pistol was also Malle’s property.
5. Ronet’s scene at the dinner party was shot so many times, the editor, Suzanne Baron chose the best takes from each of the camera shots to mirror the choppy inconstancy of his mental break-down.
6. Similar to director Vittorio De Sica, Mallle preferred to use non-actors to get closer to the purity of the moment. But after months of unsuccessful casting he finally decided on Ronet because he best resembled the novel’s protagonist French Surrealist poet and friend of La Rochelle.

Malle had to buy the rights to use the novel from author Andre Malraux because he was the administrator of La Rochelle’s will.