Fire Within, The: The Criterion Collection

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Roger Ebert has a penchant for describing films as "wise." Louis Malle´s remarkable "The Fire Within" ("Le feu follet," 1963) certainly qualifies as a "wise" film. It is the most sensitive, perceptive and resonant portrait of depression I have ever seen.

In a film full of wise moments, the wisest arrives near the end. Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet), a writer fresh out of alcohol rehab, has been on a desperate quest to reconnect with lost friends. He drops strong hints to each of them that he intends to "leave." Most people are too busy to pick up on it, or unwilling to get involved. Sitting on a bench in Paris at nighttime, one friend finally takes an interest in him. As Alain expresses his sense of abject failure and lost opportunities, the friend asks "What is it you wanted?" (The use of past tense adds a chilly touch to the scene.) Alain, tired and spent, answers, "I´d have liked to captivate people, hold onto them, bind them close. So that things would stay still around me. But it always went to hell."

I don´t whether the lines come from the 1931 Pierre Drieu novel the film is based on or from Malle´s screenplay, but they provide the most perfect and concise expression of loneliness and depression I have ever heard. "I would have liked to captivate people." Alain aches in body and soul from his inability to make people care enough (enough being the key word) to share their lives with him. "So that things would stay still around me." Alain, somewhere around age 30, has remained suspended in a state of semi-adolescence. The world has moved on. His friends have moved on; they share their time with other people now; they have busy lives, too busy to find room for him. And though Alain loved people desperately, needed them desperately, he found himself further distanced from them with each passing day, not because he left them, but because he stayed right where he was, and they didn´t.

The tone of the film is so perfect it is difficult to describe. Time and again, Alain simply pauses to watch people walk by. Couples. People on their way to other places. Full lives that he will never be able to touch, that he believes he will never have for himself. They are moving, always moving, and he only sits watching.

Both director and lead actor collaborate to capture this precise tone. For Malle, this was a deeply personal project: he identified so strongly with the main character that he had Maurice Ronet dress in his own clothes and adopts his own mannerisms. Ronet, though playing Malle´s alter-ego, still finds a way to own the part for himself. He had previously acted for Malle in "Elevator to the Gallows," but his performance here is his shining moment. His gesture, his posture, and his haunted eyes ooze a sense of passive defeat. In psychological terms, Alain is trapped in a state of learned helplessness; nothing he does has any impact on his life anymore, at least not in a way he wants, so he simply does nothing. Nothing but wait. And watch.

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