MUBI

There’s nothing better than lying down in pitch blackness with french new wave oozing from your screen. Maybe it was because I was sleepy or Erik Satie’s piano played with my mind, but some of the imagery in this film really felt familiar, almost nostalgic. The thing I didn’t familiarize myself with is the main character, though I’ll have to try again when I reach his age. I don’t see how anyone can be unhappy while having a large base of friends, especially in a social setting with people that you fit in with. The mind would be too absorbed in fulfilling its social needs rather than worrying or thinking. But let’s see what our protagonist Alain really wanted out of life: “I’d have liked to captivate people, hold on to them, bind them close.” What’s the point in captivating people? People captivate me all the time and at the end of the day it means nothing to me when I make a peanut butter & jelly sandwich. No, there has to be a more selfish point to life: watching films. I just finished watching my first Malle (hopefully more in the future), now listening to Satie’s early piano works and writing this review. Behold dear reader I am in the prime of my life.

edit: I went to bed after and realized perhaps I was thinking too fast. Maybe Alain’s point was not to captivate people, but to captivate people as a means of gaining that sense of fulfillment in interpersonal relationships. I think I get it now… it’s like ordering a happy meal at McDonalds (ie having friends) and walking with your tray to your table to reap the benefits, but tripping halfway leaving you angry, unsatisfied and hungry. No wonder I couldn’t relate to our friend here, I’m too poor to eat at McDonalds.

I’m not exactly sure what to say about the film, except that I found myself considering what exactly Alain was thinking throughout his last hours. I realized that what I loved so much about The Fire Within is that there is no end to what Alain had on his mind, because he was revisiting his entire life. Malle tells you so much with so very little, and because of that I think this is his most fully realized effort. P.S. Perfect use of Satie.

Louis Malle directs this adaptation of La Rochelle’s account of the suicide of a friend, himself at a crossroads, having just turned 30 and his biggest hit (“The Lovers”) five years past, almost as if our wandering hero (Maurice Ronet in the performance of his career) is the auteur, looking for an existential out following earlier commercial success. As Ronet visits friends from an earlier life, knowing full well his gun awaits him back home, we get a sense of Paris in the early ‘60’s, still on tilt and nervous from the Algerian War, but chic and stylish just the same, a contrast that psychologically suggests the uneven balance of the character’s dire motivations to connect with the past, and obliterate a potential future.