getfert.blogg.se

It comes at the expense of his wife, who is presented as both a sexy young object of desire and an angelic innocent whose loyalty and love is almost sacrificial.Ĭhabrol's film faced charges of misogyny upon release largely because Chabrol remained steadfast in his portrayal of Paul not as a monster but as a victim of madness. Ultimately, that’s what gives L’Enfer its unsettling power. It makes him far more interesting than merely a madman or a bully-his pathological jealousy spins out of control in a chilling conclusion that leaves the viewers uncomfortably nestled in his madness. Hallucinations and nightmares twist his dementia until he imagines her sleeping with every man in sight and his obsessive spying turns her life into a living hell (which, coincidentally, is the loose translation of the film’s title).Ĭhabrol's film is less a thriller than a psychological study and he injects Clouzot’s dark, misanthropic tale with a soupçon of Hitchcock’s voyeuristic obsessions and with his own empathy for the tormented husband. Then he becomes convinced she is having an affair and his jealousy spins to insane proportions. Chabrol revived the project decades later on a much smaller scale at the urging of Clouzot's widow, rewriting the screenplay to favor his own thematic preoccupation with guilt and the reverberations of one's action on loved ones.įrancois Cluzet stars a happily married man with a beautiful, younger wife (Emmanuelle Beart) and an adorable son, running a gorgeous little resort getaway. Clouzot attempted to film it in the early 1960s but had to abandon it when the production spiraled out of his control and he was incapacitated by a heart attack. under its French title L'enfer, this 1995 psychological thriller was directed by Claude Chabrol from an original screenplay by filmmaker Henri-George Clouzot.