Fashion in Film Festival ’18: The Inferno Unseen

It is maybe the most infamous unfinished film ever, with its poignancy heightened by its tragic star. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is now probably every cineastes’ favorite lost movie, thanks to Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea Annonier’s documentary (released in New York in 2010), but Romy Schneider would probably be the favorite of far more movie fans had she not died prematurely at forty-three, from cardiac arrest. She should be considered an icon on the level of Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren. Viewers will understand that assertion when they watch The Inferno Unseen (trailer here), a collection of surviving rushes and screen tests from Clouzot’s film that never was, assembled into a master-cut by Rollo Smallcombe & Marketa Uhlirova, which screens on the opening night of the Fashion in Film Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Clouzot was often dubbed the “French Hitchcock,” but his work seemed dated during the era of the Nouvelle Vague. However, the suspense auteur had a vision that would have leap-frogged all the New Wavers. As he originally conceived Inferno, it would have told the story of a jealous older husband possibly driven to murderous extremes by his highly desirable young wife, but there would have been experimental interludes that would have expressed his psychological turmoil through surreal imagery. Despite a lot of money spent by Columbia Pictures, it never came together.

The Bromberg-Annonier documentary tells that story quite compellingly. In Unseen, Smallcombe & Uhlirova invite us to engage with the images directly, with minimal filters, aside from a smattering of commentary from Bromberg. Taking in this footage is a weird experience. You feel like you are watching the ghost of a film that was stillborn, yet still haunts the cinematic collective unconscious, very much like the work print of Orson Welles’ The Deep that screened at MoMA in 2015.

Of course, Schneider makes it even more haunting. She was one of the few movie stars who could exude sexual magnetism through the screen yet was also totally credible playing classy and cerebral characters. In fact, the surviving footage is surprising steamy, thanks to Schneider and French starlet Dany Carrel, who both rock the frocks and swimwear designed by legendary film costumer Jacques Fonteray (whose credits include Barbarella, Borsalino, and Moonraker). There is indeed good reason Inferno Unseen is opening the Fashion in Film Festival.

Clouzot’s Inferno is one of the most tantalizing what-could-have-been stories in cinema history, along with Jodorowsky’s Dune and half a dozen unfinished Welles films. The assembled images in Inferno Unseen help satisfy our lingering curiosity, while also inspiring elegiac feelings for something that never was. It is highly recommended as a viewing experience this Friday (4/6) at MoMI, with a live electronic score accompaniment by Smallcombe, while the earlier documentary is highly recommended as some truly fascinating cinema history when it premieres on MUBI this Saturday (4/7).

Five by Sautet: The Things of Life

Pierre Bérard is putting the “crisis” back into the midlife crisis. We are talking shattered windshields and twisted metal here. Not surprisingly, he will be carried away from the car crash, leaving behind a fateful letter and some profoundly unfinished business behind in Les Choses de la Vie or The Things of Life, which screens as part of Rialto Pictures’ program of five DCP-restored films by the late, great Claude Sautet, opening today in New York (series trailer here).

Sautet is largely remembered for his extraordinarily sensitive human dramas, but he could also stage an impressive car crash. Initially, it is not clear how bad it is for Bérard, but there will at least be sufficient time for his life to flash before his eyes. Out of courtesy to the audience, Bérard skips his short pants years, focusing on his relationship issues with his mistress Hélène Haltig that came to a head in recent days.

In this case, mistress is a slightly misleading term. Although the architect is still married to his wife Catherine, it is largely a business relationship that allows them both to carry-on rather openly with their respective lovers. It is so French, it is hard to understand why he agrees to formally leave Madame Bérard for Mademoiselle Haltig, a young, beautiful expatriate translator. In fact, Bérard starts to wonder that himself when Haltig’s jealousy erupts. All this leads to quite the bloody intersection, both physically and emotionally.

If this all sounds familiar, hopefully it is because you saw it when it was released in 1970. On the other hand, if you are getting flashbacks of Intersection, Mark Rydell’s American remake starring Richard Gere and Sharon Stone, try your best to forget it. The film is obviously built around a strong conceit, but in Sautet’s hands it never feels forced or programmatic. Yet, he exploits the feeling of inevitability for all its worth, giving us butterflies whenever Bérard steps into his sporty Alfa Romeo.

The trio of Sautet, his frequent leading lady Romy Schneider, and his regular score composer Philippe Sarde were a francophone art house dream team, joining forces on several films, including Max et les Ferailleurs and César and Rosalie, also represented in Rialto’s Sautet package. Michel Piccoli would certainly be no stranger to any of the three. Much like his disillusioned screenwriter in Godard’s Contempt, Piccoli radiates industrial strength world weariness, but in a way that feels mature rather than self-indulgent. Frankly, the unfaithful and indecisive Bérard could have easily come across like a fickle jerk, but Piccoli conveys all the older man’s guilt and uncertainty, making him understandable and maybe even sympathetic (especially if you’re French).

Piccoli and Schneider develop convincingly complicated chemistry as Bérard and Haltig. She is a sophisticated presence and she definitely connects in some emotionally resonant scenes down the stretch, but the translator is conspicuously subordinate to the architect in Things’ narrative.

Things is a tragedy that is not afraid to be tragic—and rightly so. Sautet and Piccoli had enough middle-age seasoning to relate to the characters and themes, as well as the experience and instincts to avoid melodramatic excesses. Sad in a wry and rewarding way, The Things of Life opens today (6/12) in New York, at the Lincoln Plaza, along with four other restored Sautet films.

Cine-Simenon: The Last Train

Women, children, and the well-to-do sit up front.  Prostitutes, ruffians, and the socially marginalized hunker down in the cattle cars bringing up the rear.  Of course, they were Georges Simenon’s kind of people and they turn out to be more fun to travel with in Pierre Granier-Deferre’s The Last Train, an adaptation of Simenon’s tragic romance set amid WWII evacuation chaos, which screens during the Anthology Film Archives’ Cine-Simenon retrospective.

Julien Maroyeur is a shy radio repairman in a sleepy French village on the Belgian border. His out-of-his-league wife is probably the only notable thing about him. Given her very pregnant state, they are reluctant to leave home, but news of the advancing German army convinces them.  The nuns find a place for Madame Maroyeur and their young daughter in a respectable compartment, but he will be stuck in the back of the train.  However, along with the dregs of society, he will share his car with the mysterious Anna. 

Initially, the beautiful woman says very little.  The knuckleheads seem to think her accent sounds German, but she seems more anxious than anyone to avoid the National Socialists.  Effectively segregated from his family, Maroyeur takes a protective interest in the woman that quickly evolves into something far deeper.

Considering Simenon’s controversial wartime years, The Train is a bit of an oddity in his oeuvre.  Nonetheless, it is wholly fitting Granier-Deferre, the Simenon specialist, would be represented in Cine-Simenon.  Incorporating archival WWII newsreel footage into the film, he keeps viewers fully cognizant of the wider geopolitical horrors throughout what is admittedly at times a rather melodramatic story.

Indeed, Granier-Deferre vividly captures the strange nature of the flight.  With everyone losing sight of previous responsibilities, it becomes almost a madcap vacation, punctuated by moments of abject terror.  Tellingly Maroyeur himself admits they have all “lost perspective.”

Last Train might have an odd tonal shift here or there, but it is hard to go too far wrong with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Romy Schneider as the not-so secret lovers.  Their chemistry is quite convincing, because it is clearly rooted in their respective characters’ personalities.  The quiet moments shared by the screen legends have affectionate warmth beyond mere erotic heat.

Much like Man on the Eiffel Tower, there are some less than optimal dubbed prints of Last Train in circulation, so it is worth noting AFA will screen it in its original French with English subtitles.  Despite the often jarring editing, it is a good, solid film, offering a unique perspective on the French civilian war experience.  Anchored by the haunting Schneider, The Last Train is recommended for French film connoisseurs when it screens this Tuesday (8/20) and Wednesday (8/21) at Anthology Film Archives. 

Sautet at FSLC: Max et les Ferrailleurs

Most Americans would consider it entrapment.  One unyielding Parisian Detective would say it is just “pas de chance.”  He is determined to catch his man red-handed, so if he has to help matters along, then so be it.  However, things do not go strictly according to plan in Claude Sautet’s Max et les Ferrailleurs, which starts its premiere American theatrical run this Friday in conjunction with the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s The Things of Life: Claude Sautet retrospective.

Max has issues, but money is not one of them.  Like a French Milton Hardcastle, the well-heeled crusader was once a judge, but became a cop after he was forced to free too many criminals on technicalities.  His obsession with iron-clad proof stems from this experience.  It has not been working out well lately though.   This will indeed be bad luck for Abel Maresco, a petty lowlife and onetime comrade-in-arms with Max, who has the misfortune of crossing the copper’s path. 

Maresco is on the lowest rung of the criminal ladder.  He is a junkman, who literally lives of the metal and junked cars castoff by serious crooks.  Basically deciding he looks guilty, the anti-hero plants the suggestion that it is time for Maresco and his crew to pull a real job.  To nurture this seed, he starts visiting Maresco’s streetwalking girlfriend Lily, in the guise of Felix, a neighborhood branch banker who regularly receives large deposits from the wholesale meat market.

Ferrailleurs is a fascinating film in Sautet’s canon, because it incorporates elements of both his early noirs (like the briskly entertaining Dictator’s Guns) and his late period intimate character studies.  Beginning in media res, and proceeding to tour through the dodgy corners of Nantes, it observes most of the noir conventions.  Indeed, Max is certainly one cold fish of an anti-hero.  Yet, the scenes of the emotional distant older man developing an ambiguous relationship with a younger, more passionate woman prefigures several of his career defining masterworks, such as Un Coeur en Hiver and Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud.

Frankly, it is downright bizarre it took so long for Ferrailleurs to get a proper American release, given the combination of Sautet and its stars, Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider.  The title is an obvious suspect, usually translated as Max and the Junkmen, unfortunately suggesting a Francophone Sanford & Son.  Nonetheless, it is anything but.  In fact, it represents one of Schneider’s sultriest turns, giving her the opportunity to rock some Klute-like threads—again, all very noir worthy.  She also plays off Piccoli’s ultra-reserved protagonist quite effectively.   His Max is a bit of a cipher, but he clearly suggests a tightly wound man about to snap. 

Though it ends in a rather shocking (but oddly logical) place, Ferrailleurs is ultimately quite satisfying.  While its characters are thoroughly compromised, it serves as a sharply delineated morality play, featuring a funky soundtrack from the great Philippe Sarde.  Must viewing for Schneider fans and Sautet appreciators, Max et les Ferrailleurs opens this Friday (8/10) at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, in tandem with the FSLC’s continuing The Thing of Life: Claude Sautet retrospective.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno

It would have been a case of an old master dramatically one-upping the young turks, but it was not to be. Instead, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s radical foray into psychological expressive filmmaking cratered during its chaotic production. However, 185 cans of film survived of Clouzot’s obsessive tests and aborted three-week shoot, giving viewers a tantalizing sense of what his creative vision might have looked like had he successfully realized it in Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea Annonier’s documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (trailer here), which opens this Friday at the IFC Center.

Often labeled the French Hitchcock, Clouzot was one of the most successful French director’s of his time. Yet, the Nouvelle Vague was often rather dismissive of the man who helmed classics like Diabolique and The Wages of Fear. In 1964, he easily secured the cast he wanted for his prospective new film. Romy Schneider was to portray Odette, the young vivacious wife of middle-aged inn-keeper Marcel, played by Serge Reggiani. Initially tranquil in their wedded bliss, Marcel’s obsessive jealousy would lead to his emotional implosion. If this premise sounds vaguely familiar, it is because Claude Chabrol’s L’Enfer, starring Emmanuelle Béart, was based on Clouzot’s original screenplay. Ultimately though, Chabrol made a Chabrol film rather than the deliberately experimental work Clouzot envisioned.

Clouzot filmed the couple’s daily lives in black-and-white, but Marcel’s jealous rages were rendered in psychedelic color. With morphing faces, surrealist dreamscapes, color inversions, and other bizarre optical innovations, Inferno would have been one strange head-trip. It was also somewhat racy, featuring Schneider, already an international superstar, and French starlet Dany Carrel bare-breasted. This was completely unlike any previous Clouzot film, yet Columbia Pictures gave him carte blanche to do as he pleased.

Many of the surviving crew members speculate the blank check from Hollywood might have been a mixed blessing, removing the imposed discipline of financial constraints from a production that spun out of control. Relations deteriorated on the set, until eventually the whole enterprise collapsed. Yet, the swirling images that survive sans soundtrack still have a disconcerting effect.

Bromberg and Medrea Annonier interview a number of Clouzot’s surviving collaborators on the ill-fated project, including his assistant director Costa-Gavras. They also stage readings of Clouzot’s script with Bérénice Bejo and Jacques Gamlin as the troubled couple, but this seems somewhat unnecessary given the existence of the Chabrol film (which the documentary never references). Still, the combined effect their original footage and Clouzot’s extant film and story-boards give an intriguing impression of what might have been.

Documenting some compelling cinema history, Bromberg and Medrea Annonier’s film will drastically alter cineastes’ perceptions of Clouzot as an auteur. Indeed, forty-some years later, his innovative visual effects still retain a disorienting effect, and even in such unusual archival footage, Romy Schneider is always worth watching on screen. A great cinematic “what-if’ story, Clouzot’s Inferno opens this Friday (7/16) in New York at the IFC Center.