L’Enfer (1994)

L’Enfer is a French thriller film first released in 1994, directed by Claude Chabrol.  The film stars Emmanuelle Béart, François Cluzet, Nathalie Cardone, André Wilms and Marc Lavoine.  It has also been released under the title: Hell.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Paul Pieur is the proud owner of a country hotel which has no difficulty attracting guests, despite its proximity to an airbase.  He could not be happier.  His wife Nelly is the most beautiful and considerate partner a man could ask for and their life together is one of unalloyed joy - until the day he suspects she may be seeing another man.  Convinced that Nelly is having an affair with an attractive younger man named Martineau, Paul begins to follow her around town.  His suspicions are confirmed when she sees his wife water-skiing and cruising on Martineau’s boat.  From this moment, Paul sees signs of infidelity everywhere.  Nelly naturally denies that she has been unfaithful to her husband but Paul knows she is lying.  The dream marriage is about to become a nightmare...

One of the great losses in French cinema was H.G. Clouzot’s failure to complete what could possibly have been his greatest film and a modernist masterpiece - L’Enfer, a dark study in jealousy and paranoia starring iconic performers Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani.   Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s revelatory documentary L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (2009) not only presents the history of this failed venture but also some of the remarkably well-preserved footage, startling images which provide a tantalising glimpse of the film that never was.  If there was one filmmaker who could resurrect something from Clouzot’s ill-fated concept, who could engage fully with its deliciously dark subject matter and deliver a film of comparable intensity and stylistic brilliance, that filmmaker was Claude Chabrol, a director who, like Clouzot, is often likened to Hitchcock.

Claude Chabrol’s L’Enfer has a distinctly Clouzot-like feel to it, both in its subject matter and its subtle but highly effective stylisation.  Those who have an appreciation of both men’s work can hardly have failed to note the similarity in their films, but here it is hard to know where Clouzot ends and Chabrol takes over.  One memorable night-time sequence in L’Enfer closely resembles a fragment of the chilling climax to Les Diaboliques (1955), whilst the film’s use of sound (brilliantly so in the last twenty minutes) and long, menacing tracking shots owe as much to Clouzot as to Chabrol.   After a decade in which Chabrol’s career had shown distinct signs of stagnating, L’Enfer marked a dramatic return to form and anticipates the great films that were yet to come, notably La Cérémonie (1995) and Merci pour le chocolat (2000), two of the director’s finest films.

L’Enfer is easily one of Claude Chabrol’s most unsettling films, and  it takes two or three viewings to realise just what a disturbing and sophisticated piece of cinema it is.  Mental derangement is a subject that the director has explored many times in his oeuvre, but most often as a detached onlooker.  Here, Chabrol takes us over the threshold, into the warped mind of a man that is slowly disintegrating through an obsessive and completely irrational fear that his wife is cheating on him.  The splintered reality which the film presents reflects the points of view of the two protagonists, the hotel owner and his wife, and we can never be quite certain which of the two viewpoints is the truth, if indeed either is true. 

Is Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart at her absolute best) the pouting strumpet who makes a habit of bedding every man who crosses her path, as her husband Paul thinks?  Or is she the victim of a tragic misunderstanding, the faithful wife who just happens to leave behind her a trail of clues that make her appear to be a serial philanderer?  Just where does reason end and insanity take over?  In the end, both characters are trapped in a dreamlike state of submission and self-immolation, a grotesque parody of marital union in which husband and wife are tethered to one another not by love but as willing participants in a dark ritual of sadomasochistic abandon.  Their sanity in tatters, their lives ruined, Nelly and Paul still have each other, and in Hell they will reside, side by side, for eternity.  It is, as the film aptly states, a story without end.

© James Travers 2011

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