Le Feu follet / The fire within / Will o' the wisp / 1963

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Le Feu follet

1963 Drama

Credits

Director: Louis Malle
Script: Louis Malle, based on a novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Photo: Ghislain Cloquet
Music: Erik Satie
Cast: Maurice Ronet (Alain Leroy), Léna Skerla (Lydia), Alexandra Stewart (Solange), Bernard Noël (Dubourg), Jeanne Moreau (Jeanne), Bernard Tiphaine (Milou), Henri Serre (Frédéric)
Country: France
Language: French
Runtime: 108 min, B&W
Aka: The Fire Within; Will o' the Wisp

Summary

In a private nursing home near to Paris, a burnt out writer, Alain Leroy, is being treated for alcoholism. Despite being almost cured of his addiction, Alain, in his mid-thirties, has recurring bouts of depression and has resolved to kill himself in a few days’ time. One morning, he sets out on one final trip to Paris. Here, he meets up with old friends and lovers, but contact with the people he once knew and loved feels increasingly superficial. There is only one way his life will have any impact on them…

Review

Louis Malle’s bleakest film is this haunting portrait of a wreck of a man quietly counting down his last few hours before his well-planned suicide. Whilst the narrative is closely based on a novel by Pierre Drieu, the film has a strong auto-biographical element. At the time, Louis Malle had doubts about his future, living by night and becoming increasingly dependent on alcohol. This would account for why the film has such a strong emotional impact, and why the first-person perspective works so well. Like any great artist, Malle projects his own traumas into his film, and it is interesting to speculate how much of the director there is in the film's principal character, a disillusioned writer for whom suicide offers the only mechanism for achieving a life with meaning.

Another reason why the film works so well is the exceptional contribution from its leading actor, the magnificent Maurice Ronet. Malle originally intended giving the part of the suicidal writer Leroy to a non-professional actor, but finally settled on Maurice Ronet, a personal friend and a great actor. Le Feu follet sees Ronet give his most captivating and well-judged performance – his portrayal is fascinating but not wholly sympathetic. Part of the genius of this film is that Malle doesn't require us to like his protagonist. Indeed, the film would lose much of its meaning and impact if Ronet played Leroy as an attractive or even pathetic character. The rationale for Leroy's suicide is apparent early on in the film, so the trajectory is pretty certain. In a sense, the character is already dead when the film begins.

One of the things that most preoccupies an artist (writers and filmmakers being no exception) is the need to feel that his work will live on after his death. This notion is at the heart of Le Feu follet and, possibly, Malle's motivation for making the film. The character Leroy realises that he is unlikely to achieve the kind of immortality which, as a writer, he needs, and so he turns to drink. Recovering from alcoholism, he discovers how little he has affected the lives of those around him. It is almost as if he does not exist, has never existed. From depression there grows a narcistic self-obsession which can only reinforce his sense of isolation and failure. At one point in the script, Leroy is referred to, ironically, as a “revenant”, a spirit that roams the Earth for a short time before entering the afterlife. Ronet’s portrayal has a strange ghost-like quality that emphasises his character’s disconnection from the world around him and makes his fate inevitable. The writer has to write himself out of his own life in order to bring himself alive.

The film’s melancholic tone and rigorous lack of sentimentality is beautifully underscored by Erik Satie’s piano music. This accompanies Leroy on his journey towards self-destruction in a way that skilfully underplays the emotion whilst simultaneously echoing the existentialist void we see growing within the doomed character. With complete mastery of the tools at his disposal, Louis Malle manages to convey the state of mind of a man who has grown sick of life with harrowing realism in what is surely one of his greatest, most poignant films.

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