Things fall apart: The cinema of Henri-George Clouzot at TIFF Bell Lightbox

It’s commonplace to describe Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) as one of cinema’s great pessimists, so brimming with rot, despair and entropy are his films—but what makes Clouzot’s pessimism great? Perhaps it’s a matter of conviction. Some within the Nouvelle Vague characterized his films as sterile and immaculate, efficient, without life or discovery, but such accusations sound an awful lot like mistaking classical rigour for lack of engagement or inspiration. His films functioned as well-oiled machines precisely because they described the inescapable machinery of fatalism; inevitability was crucial to their moral theses. But within their strategies lies a mine field of erotic curiosities, odd detail and dark playfulness—the inevitable can’t seem inevitable while it’s unfolding; only in retrospect. Thus second and third and fourth viewings of Le Corbeau (1943), The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955)—of which you can read much more here—retain their peculiar suspense. Clouzot’s camera fully attends to the latter film’s unlucky co-heroine (played by the director’s unlucky wife, who would perish from the same ailment as her character); its deep interest is as unmistakable as it is useless. Her fate is sealed.


Clouzot’s films literally made his actors ill; he drugged them to sleep or plunged them into miniature lakes of crude oil, creating his cinema’s single-most summarizing image and giving each of his leads a case of conjunctivitis. Machinery broke down during production and sets collapsed. The resonant doom of his best films seems to have wreaked a certain havoc on its participants in some Faustian exchange for its gloomy power. Hopefully no such bad luck with befall those of you with the good luck to see Clouzot’s films during TIFF Cinematheque’s The Wages of Fear: The Cinema of Henri-Georges Clouzot, which runs at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox until November 29, 2011. The retrospective includes all his Clouzot’s films save Retour à la Vie (1949), as well as Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (2009)—of which you can read more about here. Run, do not walk, to catch these films—just take care to look both ways before you cross the street.

A liquid abyss: Diabolique

Its opening credits appear over the face of a scum-slathered swimming pool. Before long it’ll convert a bathtub into an instrument of murder, and that neglected pool will become an improvised sepulcher, enveloping human remains when full, resembling an open grave when drained. The very sight of it transformed into an empty cavity causes a woman to faint. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” someone remarks in explanation. Diabolique (1955) is an immaculately controlled study of corruption, hinging on the precarious alliance that might be taken up by a wife and her husband’s mistress upon agreeing that some people truly deserve to die. It’s also among the most elegant examples of the cinema’s use of water as a sort of liquid abyss, something mysterious, unstable, untrustworthy, and often tellingly opaque.

Diabolique was the seventh feature from director Henri-George Clouzot and the high-water mark of his commercial and critical success. Liberally adapted from the novel Celle qui n’était plus by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (whose narrative conception was similar, though it featured a very different configuration of characters), the film brims with Clouzot’s characteristic evocation of rampant dread and decay. Set in a dreary provincial boy’s school, the story concerns the killing of the sadistic, miserly headmaster Michel (Paul Meurisse) by his wife Christina (Véra Clouzot, the director’s wife), daughter of a wealthy Venezuelan family and the school’s financial benefactor, and Nicole (Simone Signoret), one of the school’s teachers and Michel’s undisguised lover. Their world is already poisonous: the staff is largely uninterested in or simply cruel to the students, the salads are spoiled and the fish is rotten (which doesn’t dissuade Michel from forcing Christina to eat it in the film’s most appallingly unforgettable scene of humiliation). Someone mentions that it’s important to take holidays because “the body needs to eliminate its toxins,” yet it’s difficult to imagine how long a holiday one would require to flush out all the toxic sludge, both literal and figurative, that might accumulate in one’s body while existing in this place.

The murder of Michel seems to go off without a hitch, until his body, transported in a large basket (rhymes with casket) and deposited in the school’s pool, fails to stay put. There’s a secret, malevolent force at work that may or may not be supernatural (and the film’s final scene maintains this ambiguity even after it seems to have been resolved). The ongoing failure to secure knowledge of Michel’s corpse’s whereabouts begins to grind away at the women’s psyches, most notably that of Christina, who suffers a heart condition and seem the more guilt-ridden of the two. Though less experienced than her costars, Véra Clouzot (who herself suffered a heart problem, one that would end her life only five years alter) gives a superb performance, imbuing Christina with a distinctive fragility that reveals itself only gradually, building up to a climatic scene that encloses the actress in a Val Lewtonesque chamber of shadows and dread, and capitalizes beautifully on her arresting eyes and physical rigidity. Signoret is characteristically confident and intriguingly evasive, her coolness recalling some of Lauren Bacall’s best performances from the previous decade. Clouzot’s exacting approach to suspense, notably devoid of scoring, depended greatly on his leads to map out the incremental twists in the narrative, and Madame Clouzot and Signoret fulfill their duties and some.

Criterion’s new DVD and blu-ray release of Diabolique (which they originally released on DVD man years ago now) arrives with a gorgeous new transfer, new cover art, and new special features, most notably an interview with historian Kim Newman concerning the film’s influence on countless thrillers and horror films. Yet the filmmaker who most readily springs to mind whenever I watch Diabolique is one that Newman fails to mention: Roman Polanski, whose morbid humour, commitment to high craftsmanship, fascination with perversion and penchant for nosy neighbours make him a very strong candidate for the contemporary filmmaker whose best work most closely resembles that of Clouzot’s.

Infernal affairs: L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot

Henri-Georges Clouzot with Romy Schneider on the set of L'Enfer

Henri-Georges Clouzot had endured dismissal from the German film industry for his Jewish associations, dismissal from the French film industry for his Nazi associations, and a bout of tuberculosis between. Upon resuming filmmaking in 1947 he directed some of the greatest French films of the postwar era, such as The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques. The latter was adapted from Boileau-Narcejac’s novel, a property hotly desired by Alfred Hitchcock, who would come to greatly admire Clouzot’s realization.

The Clouzot-Hitchcock connection is curious. Both specialized in nerve-rattling thrillers permeated with nastiness and mental instability. Both were exacting in their craft, famed for their meticulous storyboards, which were followed with such precision that Hitchcock had suggested only half-jokingly that he needn’t show up on set. But the influential critics who would soon become France’s leading filmmakers ostracized Clouzot as resolutely as they revered Hitchcock, and by the end of the ’50s Clouzot might have felt his own relevance slipping away under the force of the New Wave. He sought to refurbish his art, was immensely taken with the formal and erotic innovations in Fellini’s 8 1/2, and set out to create a film that would plumb his own anxieties. L’Enfer would demolish Clouzot’s reputation as an antique. It would be a story of sexual obsession, a radically subjective descent into the debilitating jealousy felt by a less-than-attractive older provincial hotel manager (Serge Reggiani) toward his luscious younger wife (Romy Schneider). But it fell into the familiar trap: too much money, too much ego, and a virtual absence of anyone who might challenge the director’s authority. L’Enfer was never completed, though a tremendous amount of material was shot, not enough for a reconstruction, but more than enough to create a documentary about the project’s development and catastrophic collapse.

Directed by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot uses interviews with Clouzot’s associates and collaborators and workshop performances of scenes never filmed to provide context and flesh out Clouzot’s narrative respectively. Yet nothing in this making-of-a-movie-never-made is half as compelling as watching Clouzot’s archival footage set against Gilbert Amy’s alternately brooding and abstract acoustic-electro score. Clouzot dug out everything save the kitchen sink to assemble a stockade of poppy, kaleidoscopic images, grotesque distortions, colour manipulations, and cock-teasing shots of Schneider, scantily clad or even naked, water skiing or suggestively smoking cigarettes. One image shows her tied to train tracks, breasts heaving in fear, as a charging locomotive approaches. Whether this material could have amounted to more than an assembly of fascinating, arousing and well made, if dated, imagery is difficult to determine, but as the promise of something lost it’s utterly seductive.

L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot is otherwise sturdy but pedestrian, something we can be grateful for having even if it isn’t exactly great in itself. Even on the level of providing pertinent historical facts it’s a little light, with an abrupt ending that gives little sense of the production’s aftermath, and no mention whatsoever of the 1994 Claude Chabrol film made from Clouzot’s script. There certainly isn’t any insight into what might have saved L’Enfer, even of the most fanciful sort. My dream version of the film? A complete re-shoot in which Reggiani is replaced by Clouzot himself, puffing away on his pipe, trapped in the sun-soaked erotic nightmare he himself created.