"A few more nights, the last ones. Around six this evening he would go back to Paris and plunge deep into the definitive night."(1)
If you thought you could clear a crowd of filmgoers faster with the name "Bresson" than you could with a fire hose, try using the title "Le Feu Follet." Praise all you want the discretion of the direction by Louis Malle,(2) the delicacy of the performance by Maurice Ronet, the beautiful clarity of the cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet, the perfect choice of music by Satie. Recommend the film as a masterpiece. All of this is evidently and verifiably true. But what you will always come up against is the inescapable fact that Le Feu Follet is one of the saddest and darkest films ever made. Tell this to people who haven't seen it and they will, as the saying goes, "stay away in droves." But it remains one of the most shattering experiences of my filmgoing life.
Like music, a film exists in time, in duration, and once set in motion, Le feu follet has an inexorable rhythm, like the "Adagietto" from Mahler's 5th Symphony. I have seen the film several times over the years, and in the opening scene, from the moment when Lydia speaks the words, "pauvre Alain" and we hear the first stately notes of Satie's 3rd Gymnopedie, the tone of Le feu follet has been set. One feels that a mechanism has been set in motion whose conclusion is as inevitable and inescapable for us as it is for Alain, the film's protagonist. "Protagonist" is a fitting description of Alain, since it is his agon to which we are the witnesses.
Alain has, we can deduce, failed her physically, and is mortified but not exactly surprised. '"It's been a long time," he murmured expressionlessly." Failing others is only fitting for a man who is already planning to fail himself. He spends his last 24 hours tracking down his old friends, secretly beseeching every one of them for a reason to go on living. One by one, Dubourg, Praline, Urcel, Cyrille, Solange, they disappoint him.
Malle's choice of such an obscure novel published in 1931 was unusual enough. That he followed it so closely in his adaptation is a revelation. The author, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, was more famous for being a Nazi collaborator, who committed suicide shortly after the Liberation. Born in 1893, he was one of that most unfortunate generation of Frenchmen whose coming of age coincided with the outbreak of the First World War. Wounded twice, he had crawled out of the trenches to become a member of some of the movements of the Twenties - Dada and Surrealism. His membership, however, was never purposeful. He had other fish to fry, as his political leanings pulled him further to the Right in the Thirties. Instead of Communism, Fascism attracted him, at a time when such an allegiance was fraught with consequences that he perhaps could not have foreseen. It turned out badly, as Drieu perhaps wanted it to. Suicide had been a fetish in his life, as his posthumously-published Secret Journal revealed.
In his novel Le Feu follet, Drieu modeled his hero, Alain Leroy, on Jacques Rigaud (1898-1929), a poète maudit who chased women and money with varying success until he finally carried out his own sentence of death on November 9, 1929. Like Alain, Rigaud was 30.
Louis Malle was 30 in 1963, and he had suffered the loss of a friend to suicide. He worked on an original script inspired by the experience, but was unsatisfied at the result. Someone suggested Le Feu Follet, and the result is, for me, a near-perfect success. Malle updated the novel with some minor changes - Alain can answer the telephone in his room rather than downstairs at the sanatorium, Lydia returns to New York by plane rather than by boat, instead of a truck driver asking Alain if he was "gassed," Alain tells him he doesn't work because of an illness of "the heart," instead of cashing Lydia's check into "ten crisp thousand franc notes," it's hundred franc notes. But the film differs crucially in Malle's portrayal of every major character, especially Alain. He cares deeply for Alain and for some of the people to whom he turns in his hour of need. Drieu is indiscriminately brutal toward all his characters, including the many beautiful women. Everything in the book is ineffectual. Even a car is described as "a powerful, silent, indifferent machine."
Five years before the appearance of the novel, Colette had created a sensation with her sequel to Chéri, which she called The End of Chéri. The resemblances between the novels are superficial - Chéri is practically divine, too perfect for this world. His long affair with Lea had spoiled him so completely that he was lost without her. Alain is a 30-year-old Chéri, even if such a man could never exist. He knows he has run out of chances of renewal. The final moments of both books are strikingly similar. Colette:
"Without rising, he experimented in finding a convenient position. Finally he lay down with his right arm doubled up under him. Holding the weapon in his right hand, he pressed his ear against the muzzle, which was buried in the cushions. At once his arm began to grow numb, and he realised that if he did not make haste his tingling fingers would refuse to obey him. So he made haste, whimpering muffled complaints as he completed his task, because his forearm was hurting, crushed under the weight of his body. He knew nothing more, beyond the pressure of his forefinger on a little lever of tempered steel."
Drieu:
"Propped up comfortably, neck on a pile of pillows, feet braced at the end of the bed, legs apart. Chest out, naked, well exposed. You know where the heart is. A revolver is solid, it's made of steel. It's an object. To touch an object at last."
Malle gave the role of Alain to Maurice Ronet, with whom he had worked on Elevator to the Gallows (1958). Ronet lost forty pounds for the film, and Malle provided him with his own clothes to wear. Ronet looks and acts weary, as Alain would've been after a four-month cure. His friends remark on his drawn appearance. Praline even tells him he looks like a "cadaver." Some believe his cure has worked, others know that it hasn't. Malle portrays these old friends far more gently than Drieu had. They genuinely care for Alain. In the book, Doctor de la Barbinais leaves Alain thinking that, "He dared not protest that life was good, for he felt he possessed no convincing arguments." In the film, Malle has him protest, "Alain, la vie est bonne" as he goes out the door. Alain answers, "Good for what, doctor?"
Drieu makes Alain an addict of heroin as well as alcohol. Lydia had spent one of her three nights in Paris with Alain in a police station after a narcotics raid. Malle makes him merely an alcoholic. Alcoholism being more familiar, it is easier for us to sympathise with Alain, especially when, halfway through his long day's journey, he indulges in a drink and he is quickly undone. The velocity of his decline from that moment becomes alarming, especially when it is played out in front of his friends. One of the film's most terrible revelations is that the love of all of his friends combined isn't enough to save Alain. All they can do is watch him as he falls. Malle gives Praline (or a character that is otherwise unnamed, played beautifully by Jeanne Moreau) Urcel's line, "he's a very nice boy, and a very unhappy one."
Drieu allows himself an occasional moment of tenderness toward Alain. Late in the novel, on his way back to the clinic, we read:
"Alain walked without looking at anything, as he had always done ... And yet the avenue was beautiful, like a broad shining river that rolls in majestic peace between the feet of the elephant god. But his eyes were fixed on the little world he had left forever. His thoughts wandered from Dubourg to Urcel, from Praline to Solange, and farther, as far as Dorothy, Lydia ... For him, the world was a handful of human beings. He had never thoughtthere could be anything more to it. He had never felt involved with anything larger than himself. He knew nothing of plants, of the stars: he knew only a few faces, and he was dying, far from those faces."
Malle's most significant improvement on Drieu's novel takes place in the Café de Flore scene in which Alain tracks down some old mercenary friends from the Algerian War. Supposedly OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) members, the old guard of French right wing activists who were later behind attempts to assassinate De Gaulle (3), the Minville brothers talk to Alain about "good old times," an old undisclosed "plot," and hint at upcoming adventures on a "skiing trip" to Spain. Alain tries to discourage them, calling them "boy scouts," so they abandon him in the café.
Alain restlessly watches the passing crowd. Resting on the adjacent table is an untouched glass of cognac. Cautiously, Alain drinks it. A pretty young woman watches Alain curiously until he is overcome with the effects of the cognac. Throughout the film, attractive women pass by Alain and look at him - some with interest, some with longing, others with pity - and continue on their way. Alain sometimes returns their looks, but cannot bring himself to act on them. In the Café de Flore, he even attracts the attention of a young man in the public latrine. Outside, an older man sees Alain and says to the young men with him, "See that face? Alcohol. He's finished. A shame. He was good looking. Richard was in love with him." As Drieu wrote, "The stares no longer had any effect on him: he wasn't interested in pleasing now, men or women; he was through pleasing."
Malle and Maurice Ronet make us care deeply for Alain, so that by the time the film's last scenes arrive, and we know what's coming, we are overcome with an alarming feeling of pity and of waste, watching a human being whom so many people love, but not quite enough to save him, during the last moments of his life. The voice of Solange, the last woman to hold a promise, however ephemeral, out to him, is the last voice he hears, calling out his name through a telephone receiver as he hangs up on her. In the novel, he reads a nameless detective story in his last moments. In the film, he finishes reading The Great Gatsby. There are several references to F. Scott Fitzgerald in the film, including a scene lifted bodily from his story "Babylon Revisited." Fitzgerald, too, was cured of his alcoholism too late.
I think that the reason for Alain's malaise is, simply put, his impotence. The film and the novel open in a hotel in which rooms are let by the hour. The action commences at the precise moment when Alain has climaxed - and Lydia, presumably, has not. Alain even apologizes. "It's been a long time." Later, he tells Dubourg that all his problems - with drugs, money, women - are due to the fact that "I'm a lousy lay." As a possible motivation for suicide, it's more plausible than some might think. It's rumored, based on his cryptic journal entries, that it was Cesare Pavese's complaint. Hemingway believed that Scott Fitzgerald's wife Zelda preyed on his sense of sexual inadequacy. It may sound foolish, but the inability to sexually satisfy a woman is the source of considerable male anxiety - it's even identified clinically as "performance anxiety" that can effectively paralyze a man in everything he attempts to accomplish. It is Alain's inability to satisfy Lydia and Dorothy and - potentially - Solange that leads him to his conclusion. At the house of Cyrille and Solange, humiliated by Brancion's imperious hold over Solange's attention, Alain is intoxicated with alcohol and with his own confession - his inability to touch anything. He appeals helplessly to Solange, "To leave without ever having touched anything. I don't say beauty, kindness ... with all their words ... but something human ... and then you ... you can do miracles ... Touch the leper." Of course, it is from a beautiful woman that Alain makes his last appeal for succor, for salvation. But Solange can't help him, at least not in the way that he needs help.
To his friends, his death is a rebuke. But Malle wants the viewer to feel it, too. The final image of the film is a still photo of Alain with the words "I kill myself because you didn't love me, because I didn't love you. I kill myself because we were always apart, to bring us closer together. I leave a stain on you, an indelible stain."
(1) The Fire Within by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Richard Howard, translator. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965). Incidentally, it was Malle's film that inspired renewed interest in Drieu's novel, leading to its first English translation.
(2) Malle worked as an assistant director on Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956).
(3) See The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsythe's book and Fred Zinnemann's film.
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