L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot (Henri-George Clouzot's Inferno) (2009)

This is an intriguing documentary about "Inferno," a film that Henri-Georges Clouzot started directing but was not able to complete in 1964, starring Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani in a tale of jealousy and madness at a resort hotel. Reality is shot in black and white while the hallucinations are shot in color, combined to form a hypnotic mix. Sadly, all that survives of this film are 185 film canisters comprising 13 hours of footage. What has not is a soundtrack and occasionally Berenice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin read some of the dialogue on a soundstage. This is supplemented by interviews with surviving crew members including Costa-Gavras who was an assistant on the project but I would have liked to have heard from Jean-Louis Trintignant who plays a cameo role in the drama. On such an experimental project with American support and an international star, the documentary makes the case that Clouzot bit off more than he could chew.(The first sign that something may have been wrong was the 300 page script.) While the scale may have been larger than he was used to, Clouzot is also the same person who directed Simone Signoret in "Diabolique" and Yves Montand in "The Wages of Fear." Actually, the failure may have been one of nerve, as all the lengthy preparation and tests could have been procrastination(take it from somebody who knows). And I am wondering how much of the movie was meant to be autobiographical on a psychological level, as he had suffered previously from depression and this was his first film in four years. While watching the clips in this documentary, I was struck by the notion, as I usually have while watching a Brian De Palma movie, that I have seen this movie before. And I had. Thirty years after Clouzot could not bring his movie to fruition, Claude Chabrol adapted his script with Emmanuelle Beart and Francois Cluzet starring which the documentary fails to mention, missing a valuable opportunity to compare and contrast. In any case, I recall not liking Chabrol's version, as his workmanlike approach was not quite right for Clouzot's heady vision.