The Fire Within starts in the moment following what turns out to be a man's final orgasm and ends a day later in the moment immediately preceding his death by suicide. In between, we see the film's antihero Alain Leroy weave his way through what to external impressions looks like the richly varied and reasonably comfortable trappings of a satisfying life. In his favor, Leroy ("the king") has material affluence, intelligent and witty friends, a beautiful wife and equally attractive lovers all capable of paying his bills for the sake of his attention and company, numerous contacts in both Paris and New York who are willing to put up with his melancholic mood swings, a handsome appearance, trim physique, stable health and vitality (other than his alcoholic addiction problem, from which he's been declared "fully cured") and most of all a perceptive, sensitive insight into his own emotional drives and needs. Alain knows (perhaps all too clearly) what makes himself tick, and to a degree that many people around him do not share, he's achieved a level of self-awareness that ought to be sufficient to carry him through life's trials and tribulations.
But working against him, relentlessly undermining the positive attributes numerous and resplendent enough to provoke genuine envy from so many, is his grinding sense of certainty that even all that is not enough to justify the ongoing struggle and pain associated with the task of keeping himself alive. His marriage was strained by drinking binges, womanizing and repetitious instability. The temporary satisfactions offered by short term romantic affairs have not been enough to offset the caustic sense of loss that follows their termination. The baroque quaintness and companionship found in a palatial rehab clinic, the brilliance of philosophical chatter and debate, the charm of exquisitely prepared food and drink at upscale cocktail parties and social gatherings, the sights and sounds of two of the world's most alluring metropolises, rousting about with his old buddies and sharing tales of conquest (military, narcotic, criminal, erotic, what have you), the pleasures of art, music, drugs, hedonism, archaeology, history, etc. are all given a chance to make their appeal over the course of Alain's final trek through his old haunts in Paris, but they all come up short, lacking anything in the way of substance and corporeality, at least to whatever extent of solidity and permanence would prove convincing to our despairing agonist. The direct appeal of an old and trusted friend to simply man up, leave the carefree days of youth behind and find satisfaction in maturity fails to convince Alain that his reasoning is flawed:
Even the simple pleasures of "people watching" at one of the great crossroads of humanity, a sidewalk cafe in Paris, can only cause Alain to squirm in misery as he stares into the void of meaning that turns out to be so unavoidable in his jaded, tarnished vision.
The conventional handling of suicide in most popular entertainment veers toward viewing it as an unfathomable tragedy, the mournful loss of a wounded soul who yields under the pressure of unimaginable pain, or as an excruciating mystery brought on by the crippling anguish of urgent mental health problems too convoluted for even our best therapies to adequately address. Malle's approach is different, and to more than a few viewers, quite disturbing, because he presents suicide as a rationally determined solution to a complex set of problems, the preferred alternative in certain circumstances which just about any of us could conceivably find ourselves in if the random vicissitudes of life happen to break against us that way. He based his film on a text he'd read many years earlier in his life and rediscovered shortly before shooting its adaptation. The novel La feu follet was written about, and in memory of, a Surrealist of the 1920s who committed suicide at age 30, and its author, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, eventually killed himself as well. Whether it was La Rochelle or Malle who authored the following lines, I don't know, but The Fire Within certainly is loaded with concise aphorisms that convey the morbid reflexivity of those determined to eliminate themselves from the world:
Once again, the feeling had eluded him, like a snake between stones.
It's not feelings of anxiety, doctor. It's one long feeling, of constant anxiety.
You talk about my willpower, but that's where my sickness lies.
Life flows too slowly in me, so I speed it up. I set it right.
Tomorrow, I kill myself.
I feel completely sterilized, body and soul.
It's hard to be a man. You have to want it.
It's not life itself I blame, but what's contemptible in it.
I'm not gone yet, but I'm going.I'm happy to say that Louis Malle didn't follow his own script so closely, though he did die in 1995 of lymphoma at the too-young age of 63, cutting short what still turns out to be one of the great directorial careers in cinema. Clearly, Malle saw the power of this central argument, that a coldly calculated self-induced death can be logically and ethically justified even against all the objections that one's friends, acquaintances, spouses and others might raise in counter-point. In the supplemental interview on the Criterion DVD, he speaks candidly some thirty years after the film was released about how personal this film was to him at the time. He had just turned 30 and was harboring suicidal preoccupations himself, feeling very discouraged about the course his life was on and finding little reason to take comfort in the awards, prestige and financial success generated by earlier films like Elevator to the Gallows, The Lovers or even the zany and playful Zazie dans le Metro. Unable and unwilling to follow that nihilistic impulse all the way through to its logical conclusion, he admits that he "just made a film instead," and the result was the first of his movies that lived up to his own very high standards. The realization of his vision turned out to have a very positive motivational effect on his subsequent work, proving that sometimes it really is not better to burn out, even at the risk of fading away.
Beside Malle's impeccable stylistic chops (including the documentarian skills he picked up working as an apprentice to Jacques Cousteau and the very brief visual reference in one scene to 1962's short doc Vive la Tour), another large share of credit for The Fire Within's powerful impact must be given to Maurice Ronet, the French matinee idol who brought Alain Leroy to life, so to speak. (I feel a bit sheepish at the moment, because I just recorded a podcast on one of Ronet's most famous roles, as Phillippe Greenleaf in Rene Clement's Purple Noon, within making the connection to his performance in this one.) Ronet, a good friend of Malle's since they worked together on Elevator to the Gallows, was driven quite hard by his director. forced to lose enough weight to look like a gaunt rehab patient and carrying a heavy acting load in many solo scenes that required him to project profound despair and alienation without succumbing to maudlin fits of scenery-chewing. Indeed, it's that nouvelle vague inspired sense of cool detachment and world-weary contempt for sentimentality that makes The Fire Within such a compelling and potentially dangerous movie.
Overly empathic and existentially-oriented viewers are advised to exercise some caution before casually popping The Fire Within into your DVD player or viewing the streaming version available on Criterion's Hulu Plus channel. It's the kind of movie that, with it's immaculate construction, somber aesthetic beauty, insinuating dark humor and erudite examination of the suicidal mindset, may just prove too persuasive and result in the kind of self-injurious "foolish things" alluded to in that lead quote. That's especially the case if one is feeling somewhat in sync with Alain Leroy's quandary at the moment - emotionally detached from meaningful interpersonal commitments, aimless and disconnected from any significant vocation in life, fed up and disgusted with the wasted opportunities of one's past and lacking in confidence that any new tricks or techniques have been learned that would improve the chances of the future yielding any better results. While The Fire Within has much to commend itself as a film, and as a bracing confrontational challenge to all of us comfortable "resigned bourgeois" to whom director Louis Malle was speaking (himself included), I think it's best for everyone concerned that we enter into viewing it with some kind of affirmative connection to the world we live in and the lives we lead. Otherwise, foolish tragedies may ensue, if our inner fire succeeds in consuming its host.
Next: The Organizer