Customer Reviews

L' Enfer

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

 

 

I bought and had to return this DVD twice because it is a badly flawed transfer. Considerably worse than the VHS. Only filler was a trailer which was unwatchable because the video and audio broke up.

This is a wonderful piece of work. It makes you tingle they way in which jealosy is portrayed as a person living in fear, anger and desperation. The iterview and commentary from the the director was also profound.

One of the best films I've ever seen.

Reality, or fantasy is the immediate question posed in Claude Chabrol's L'Enfer. The man who carries the mantel the"French Hitchcock" Chabrol delivers a taut, bare to the bones thriller.

When husband Paul (Francois Cluzet) begins to believe his beautiful, flirtatious wife Nelly (Emmanuelle Beart) is fooling around, his psychological demise is quick, and intense.

Chabrol brings us the story primarily from Paul's point of view, leaving many of the ambiguities, as well as the uncertainties of this tale to our own imagination.

From a script of Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique, Wages of Fear) written in 1964, Chabrol updates the original (Clouzot never finished his version due to failing health, he died in 1977) giving it the contemporary setting and dialogue, but maintaining a style of presentation consistent with the thrillers of that era.

I love this early exchange: Nelly: "You're following me, Paul." Paul: "Why would I, is there any reason?" Nelly: "No, but if you keep it up, there will be."

Emmanuelle Beart shows why she is one of the world's great stars. American audiences have yet to have the best of Beart, who's English speaking debut (Mission:Impossible) seemed uneven, almost clumsy. But here she delivers on all cylinders: a beautiful seductress. Calculating? Unfaithful? We'll see.

Highly recommended.

Be aware that unfortunately, this DVD has non-removable subtitles!

Apart from this, in my view, one of Chabrol's finest efforts starring Francois Cluzet and Emmanuelle Béart giving a superb performance only equalled by her other work with Claude Sautet.

A real bad quality tranfer of video

The film: "What a horrible little film Claude Chabrol has made!" [I translate loosely.] The French reviews must have gone something like this. When the critics of Cahiers du Cinema gave the nod of approval to an "auteur", it was nearly impossible for him to fall from grace. In re-watching "l'Enfer", I can at least speak for myself in saying that he wrote himself off of the list of directors in whom I place some trust... and into the shadowy realm of "has-been"s. I would be surprised if the critics felt differently.

Why do I despise this film so intensely? First and foremost, none of it is in the least bit original... or believable. Paul and Nelly meet one afternoon at his newly purchased hotel, as by chance. He looks her over, clowns around a bit, etc. Flash forward to wedding. And so on. There is no relationship developed between the two, nor any reason for their love to exist at all. I can forgive one such transgression in the first five minutes of a film, but come on! I mean... to call this plot Swiss cheese does cows everywhere a helluva disservice! Paul's reasons for doubting his wife's fidelity are based on loose, circumstantial evidence, yet, somehow, this kind father and doting husband slips into a personal hell of his own creation: INSANE jealousy! Is Chabrol kidding with this crap? I can't believe that this is the same director who gave us such an honest, compelling vision of psychosis 25 years earlier in "Les Bonnes Femmes". What could have happened over that time for to have regressed to creating this imbecilic, one-sided portrait of obsession that is nearly as silly a cautionary tale as "Reefer Madness".

It is almost pointless to evaluate the performances of the cast, given the poor quality of the script (not to mention editing that manifestly shows that Chabrol's cinematic "language" never made it out of the 1960s)... but I will. Emmanuelle Beart is superb, as she usually is, as a bouncy, innocently flirtacious young wife and later as a battered, defeated prisoner of the evil Paul. Her talents are utterly wasted here, for, as one of the garage mechanics said in Stephen King's "Christine", "You can't polish a turd." Francois Cluzet delivers an over-the-top Paul that ranks up there with Eric Roberts' performance in "Star 80" (though not nearly as convincing.) Sure, he's got ample reason to be insecure... but the dizzying heights to which he carries his all-consuming distrust simply aren't warranted by the scanty clues of his cuckolding. The rest of the cast are fine in their nearly invisible roles.

Final words on the film: If this is supposed to be "mature" work, it is little wonder that Chabrol has been excluded from winning nearly every major award. I am frankly shocked that the great Clouzot wrote the majority of this screenplay. I'd like to think that Chabrol's adaptation is at fault, but perhaps there was a reason that Clouzot never shot it. In sum, the only "hell" is sitting through this mindless exercise in misogyny.

The DVD: Possibly the worst transfer in my 1000+ DVD collection. Here are some general adjectives: dull, muted, washed out, grainy, pixellated (wish I'd been when I was watching it!), dark... and riddled with artifacts, flashes and even skips! No... not just DVD skips, of which there were plenty, but ACTUAL GAPS IN THE FILM! What kinda busted, to' up print did Fox Lorber use for this transfer? It looks worse than the VHS. I even have a suspicion that a VHS tape was the source, and an over-rented one at that. Oh... and let me hurl one last insult at this disgraceful, cocktail coaster of a DVD: When I said "dark" before, I meant that the night scenes were so black at times that my television threatened to collapse on itself and suck me through a black hole in to the land of bad cinema. But, no worries... I got there on foot by the end of the film!

My verdict: A must-not see. A waste of money. I'd be afraid to sell this kind of garbage on eBay and would pity the fool who'd buy it (as I foolishly did.) I'm tempted to write out the 101 best uses for this DVD, though I'd exceed Amazon's 1000 word limit. The bottom line is... If you like Claude Chabrol, see "Les Biches" or "Les Bonnes Femmes" or "Le Boucher"... or nearly any of his pre-1970 films. If you like Emmanuelle Beart, see "Manon des Souces" or "La Belle Noiseuse" (and by the way... If you want to see her in the nude, you're out of luck in "l'Enfer", you dirty rascal!) And if you like Francois Cluzet, I seriously question whether you recognize good acting, despite the fact that he's appeared in several solid films. [Question: Do you also think that Jean-Pierre Leaud was a fine performer after "The 400 Blows", when he "learned" to "act", simply because he starred in "Porcile" and "Last Tango in Paris"?]

I'm going to sprinkle myself with holy water after this abomination and turn in for the night. If you choose to buy this film, heedless of my words, you may want to invite your local exorcist over to watch it with you.

The images and subject matter of this unusual, mesmerizing film, "L'Enfer" based on Henri-Georges Clouzot's final script and adapted and directed by French Hitchcock, Claude Chabrol are breathtakingly beautiful. After seeing his "La Ceremonie" I became a hardcore Chabrol fan embarassingly for the first time that I can remember. Clouzot is also a favorite of mine and usually posthumous marriages of this kind could fare better like Traufaut's script of "The Little Thief." The acting is superb. I do not know what the fuss is about the "DVD transfer" as I ordered a used copy that was perfect and everything is gloriously preserved to watch again and again, it is that brilliant.

Love this movie, it's so weird. Anybody who is psychotically jealous, or has been with anyone jealous, can relate to this movie.

L'Enfer is a film about a young French couple who moved to a lake resort in hopes of finding peace from the stress of the city life with their young son. This film contains a very real circumstance which many couples experience. The accuracy of the insanity of the husbands justifiable suspiscions turn into an absolute destructive obsession is all to real in a very disturbing way. This film is a must-see and may even prevent yourself from falling into this vortex of self-induced paranoid psychosis.

Although Emmanuelle Béart (Manon des sources (1986), Un coeur en hiver (1992) etc.) is particularly beautiful in this Claude Chabrol film and entirely compelling in the role of a free-spirited wife suspected of adultery, and even though her co-star Francois Cluzet (Une affaire de femmes (1988)) does a fine job as a man obsessed with jealousy, this turns out to be an almost boring movie.

I think the problem is in the ambiguity about Nelly's infidelity that director and scriptwriter Chabrol relied on. Ambiguity by itself does not create tension. Artistic tension comes from an interplay within the mind of the viewer between an anticipated or expected result and its actual delineation. Thus in comedy we know that they will live happily ever after, and in tragedy, the fatal flaw will lead to something horrible. We can even know the end of the story, as in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet or in the Swedish film, Elvira Madigan (1967), or indeed in any number of war films, and still eagerly anticipate how it happens. In fact, I think it is always the case that we anticipate the end of a story at least in a general way: "good" will triumph over "evil," the evil person will get his or her comeuppance, the British army will win the war, etc. In modern cinema this may not seem always true since the bad guys sometimes triumph, as in noire movies. Nonetheless I think the ending of such movies is really what we expect, the revelation of the essential unfairness of the world. It becomes then only a question of just how this unfairness manifests itself. As in classic drama, the modern comédie noire may be seen as a tragedy, with society or the meek or the slow or the trusting being devoured by the wild animals of the city.

Regardless, here I think it might have been better to clearly reveal Nelly's infidelity or lack of it, early on, and then focus on its discovery or the revelation of a delusion. Obsessive jealousy is a theme that should work, but may be harder to put on film than Chabrol realized. I think too that the character of the irrationally jealous man be made manifest in some collateral way; perhaps we should see his insecurity before hand somehow; perhaps he should have some obvious shortcoming of appearance or character or there should be something from his past that leads him to irrational jealousy. Clearly an older man with a young and beautiful wife may be jealous in anticipation of the inevitable; or any man with a flirtatious wife. This is not necessarily irrational. Béart's Nelly reminds me of Brigitte Bardot from the days of her youth as in And God Created Woman (1957), a naturally warm and sensuous being, full of affection for others, very beautiful and impossibly sexy. The way Nelly walks and swings herself owes something to Bardot. The psychology of the Roger Vadim film from the fifties advanced the controversial "argument" that a woman like that needs a firm hand. Here the suggestion is that the husband's jealousy can only lead to pain and disaster, and that the only hope is complete trust. What I am trying to say is that the psychology, like the tension of the film, seemed at loose ends. It is clear before we are halfway through that Nelly really loves her husband, the real question being, is he enough for her? I also think that Nelly's character should have included something negative in it (she seems a little too good to be true), something the viewer could relate to, perhaps a past infidelity or betrayal.

Charbol is a better director than this film might indicate. See the aforementioned Une affaire de femmes (1988) starring Isabelle Huppert as an example of what he can do.