Clouzot's Inferno (movie review)

Clouzot’s Inferno (documentary) (2009) (1 hr 34 mins)

In 1964 acclaimed French film director Henri-Georges Clouzot (Wages of Fear, Diabolique) began work on his most experimental film. Engaging 3 camera crews and 150 technicians, he was planning to use innovative visual and sound effects to tell the story of extreme jealousy felt by a hotel owner towards his young wife, a role being played by Romy Schneider. But production of the film was beset with problems and when Clouzot suffered a heart attack three weeks into filming, the film was abandoned.

This French documentary from Serge Bromberg and Rux Medre tells the story of this ill-fated film, showing excerpts from the material filmed, interviews with members of the cast and crew, footage of the film-making process and reconstructed scenes using actors to recreate key scenes from the screenplay. The story turns out to be fascinating.

Given an unlimited budget by Columbia Pictures, Clouzot devoted a good deal of time to creating psychedelic visual and sound effects and from the clips of the filmed scenes one has to wonder if these effects really would have added much to the completed film. Once filming got underway, it appears that tensions started to build up. Clouzot was suffering from insomnia and would wake up the crew in the middle of the night to discuss ideas. He demanded actor Serge Reggiani repeat the same scene so often that Reggiani walked off the set, never to return.

There were other problems too: a heatwave and an artificial lake which provided a key location being emptied by the local authority. In the interviews with various cast and crew members, a picture emerges of a troubled director, struggling with his own demons and with a film that seemed to be getting out of his control. You can’t help feeling there was more going on with Clouzot than this documentary shows. Interestingly, he only made one more film (La Prisonniere) and died in 1977. In 1994 Claude Chabrol purchased the script from Clouzot’s widow and made his own version of Inferno.

Rating: 8/10