Customer Reviews

The Fire Within [VHS]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

How is it that this video has slipped out of print? I agree with much of what the other reviewers have written but think they dismiss the Ronet character's position a tad too lightly. Ronet is undoubtedly an aging dilettante who refuses to grow up, to make a meaningful connection with the "real world". But he is also a very lucid witness to the self delusions and shattering compromises his friends make to stay in the world. After all when he visits his friends to say goodbye and to look for a reason to live he is confronted by one friend burying himself in family life and arcane studies, another is taking drugs, another is a terrorist...none are really viable options to a guy who for whatever reasons has his eyes too wide open. That is what is so chilling about the movie, Ronet has woken from the dream of life to a quiet lucidity that is simply unbearable. Reading "Malle on Malle" and his take on the film, one learns that Malle has a far more ambigious view of the suicide than most of the critics one finds here. He doesn't romanticize the suicide, but he does brutally examine how one can run out of ground to stand on until suicide may be the only method of retaining a dollop of dignity. And yes the Satie music here is perfect.

31/2 stars. The Fire Within follows the last days and hours of a bon vivant who has just been cured of alcoholism. Yet he does not want to leave the sanitarium as he is afraid of himself and of life.He decides to spend the short time he has left visiting old friends one of whom might give him a reason for not taking his own life. The Fire Within moves grimly towards its predestined, shattering climax. Malle uses the melancholy piano music of Erik Satie to great effect. Not recommended to aficionados of Pollyanna.

Alain Leroy and his American wife went to live in New York. She stayed behind while he left for France. Alain had a drinking problem and his wife was not going to stand for it. When he returns to France Alain has himself checked into a clinic where he tries to overcome his drinking problems in the hopes he and his wife will get back together.

On this long day's journey into night Alain meets up with old friends and old flames. Once considered a playboy, he no longers has the appeal of a younger man, despite being only 30. The alcohol has taken its effect on him.

Practically forced to leave the clinic, since his doctor feels he is all better and eventually must face the outside world, Alain becomes a lost soul desperately trying to reach out to someone. He says he is incapable to love but really that is exactly what Alain needs. Maybe the Beatles had it right when they said, "all you need is love".

Alain is played by Maurice Ronet, who had worked with director Louis Malle before, in one of Malle's other masterpieces, "Elevator to the Gallows". Ronet may give one of his finest performances ever (he was also in "Purple Noon" and Chabrol's "The Unfaithful Wife). The look on his face as he struggles with the inner demons on his face is so realistic, that anyone who has ever had a battle with the bottle will instantly recall.

Constantly put in situations where people are drinking we can see Alain going back in his memory remembering what various drinks taste like. It's the same thing non-smokers tell me when they see me smoke. They just want to be in the same room with you and catch a whiff. Alcoholics go through the same thing. We remember how good that vodka or beer tasted. Our mouths begin to water.

All the while Alain contemplates suicide. Life has lost its purpose. He can't face these demons alone. He needs the love of his wife.

Director Malle is someone I've always felt never forces his style on a film. By that I mean he allows the story to dicate where it should go. Watch "Pretty Baby", "Atlantic City", "Murmur of the Heart", "My Dinner with Andre" each one of those films has a different feel to them. This is not to suggest Malle doesn't have his own style, he does. But he tries to adapt so it blends in with the story. We see that with this film as well.

"The Fire Within" is a piercing look at loneliness and desperation. I was able to relate to it more than I'd like to admit. It one of the most remarkable films I have ever seen. It seems to know its characters so well. The film is so dead on in its presentation of emotions one has to be not only heartless and lifeless as well not to find a connection.

I'd also like to give brief mention to the wonderful music score by Eric Satie which is used in the film and the cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet, whose work includes "Au hasard Balthazar", "The Young Girls of Rochefort" and Polanski's "Tess". Both the music and the camera work add to the film's overall intimate tone.

Bottom-line: One of Louis Malle's best films depsite its lack of popularity. A piercing look at loneliness and desperation, subjects the film seems to know all too well.

Louis Malle's film career has never received the critical recognition that it deserves. Deemed as a primarily "bourgeois" filmmaker, he moved between light comedies ("Viva Maria", "Zazie dans le Metro") to critical examinations of France's history ("Lacombe, Lucien", "Au Revoir, Les Enfants"), toward more experimental works ("My Dinner with Andre", "Vanya on 42nd Street"). This film - one of his best though least seen - portrays the final twenty-four hours of an aging and alcoholic bon vivant. He finds himself no longer able to survive on his connections, has neither the skills nor the humility to submit to a working life, and observes how his friends and relations are turning subtly cold toward him. Maurice Ronet, who plays him, interprets this role from the inside and mines the performance for every ounce of bitterness and despair that he can draw out of it. Its a tough watch but it never becomes maudlin because Malle doesn't try to wring pity out of his viewers. Ronet is a wasted man - he throws away opportunities to save himself because he doesn't want to downscale his standards or devote himself to anything but his pleasurable pursuits. He prefers to suffer and feel sorry for his lot and try to get his family and friends to coddle him. Yet, the greatness of the film lies in that we can't draw away from him either and dismiss him as a spoiled modern day fop. The bitter recognition that the style of living he has become accustomed to is a sham and that he can no longer keep up the prentice is just too wounding to casually laugh off. Malle and Ronet don't permit us any easy way of looking at this character and, by complicating our responses to him, forces to examine our feelings toward the man. Do we pity him? scorn him for a frivolous, decadent life? Malle and Ronet don't permit us to remain detached, however, and that's why the film remains so forceful albeit difficult to watch. This is indeed a "bourgeois" film about a well-off man who falls off his pedestal but the stark clarity that Malle brings to this material and Ronet's forceful interpretation transcend any didactic reading of this film. As a story of alienation and the hopelessness of seeking some form of salvation in modern life, this film compares with Bergman's greatest efforts.

Based on a surrealist writer Jacques Rigaut who committed suicide in 1945 , the film focuses the attention on the alcoholism of him instead the addiction , which was his real hell .
The last two days in the life of this artist are more than enough to sweep us in the tragic mood in a clinic for his treatment due he is unable to stop his mortal habit .
Somehow this is perhaps the most awful film inscribed in the Existential Literature Movement with Sartre and Camus as its most remarkable and fervent followers.
And since the film was a commercial failure I think this film was too much for that age in which the great interest of the audience consisted in watching the last occurrences of the most representative Enfants terrible of the New Wave : Francois Truffaut , Jean Luc Godard , Claude Chabrol and Erick Rohmer.
Malle began his first works inscribed in this movement but clearly you can see how he is concerned for subjects filled with major intensity and conceptual relevance .
His career begins with Elevator to the gallows , a clear homage to Hitchcock , Les amants , and Zazie dans le metro a curious presage of Amelie forty years before and then he grew up with this merciless masterpiece .
Maurice Ronet was never better . You saw him in Purple Noon that classic noir film of Rene Clement in the late fifties .
Malle would direct Lacombe Lucien , Le souffle a Coeur , Pretty Baby , Atlantic city , Au revoir les enfants , Damage and Dinner with Andre , stimulating and fascinating films signed for the genius of his craft .
Beware : Wolker Schlöndorff was his Assistant and the music is Satie `s Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes , performed by Claude Helfer.
The Paris Premiere took place on October 15 , 1963 and New York Premiere on February 17, 1964. .
Believe or not Malle was in his early thirties -31- when he faced this hard and exigent script based on Pierre Drieu La Rochelle novel (1931) published in New York in 1965 .

Want a synopsis ? Check the review below. I'd rather approach "The Fire Within" from a different angle. Its original title is "Le Feu Follet" - "will-o'-the wisp". In Brazil, it was titled "Thirty Years This Night", as the main character is just about to turn 30. I first saw it when I was 18, as did my contemporaries, give or take a year or two. At that time, the idea that if you're thirty and haven't sorted out your existence you may just as well put an end to it fitted our youthful arrogance perfectly. As the years went by, we got to referring to each other's ever-nearing 30th birthday as such-and-such's "feu follet". Nor was it restricted to a small clique of friends. People I met several years after the film was shown also used the same reference. In the film's closing sequence, the main character states, rather presumptiously and vainly, "I shall leave on you all an indellible mark". In a way, "The Fire Within" did just that with our sensibilities. How's that line by Paul Simon again ? "The thought that life could be better is woven indellibly into our hearts and our brains".