Took my breath away. I was floating in a black and white cloud of Satie and broken dreams. I couldn’t be more fascinated.

It may be a strange choice to say this film is perfect when it is about so many imperfections and weaknesses in the human spirit. Yet no film I’ve ever seen has captured that fragility so eloquently with the careful eye of a master craftsman.

This is the only the first Malle film I’ve seen, so I can’t judge it from an auteurist viewpoint, yet I would be crazy not to tell that in every passage in the film there is an understanding between the filmmaker and Ronet and the material it’s based on.

Before watching, a kindly old professor introduced us to a bit of history on “The Fire Within”: the author of the novel based the story on a surrealist poet he knew who had killed himself and soon after writing the book the author chose to take his own life too.

It seems Louis Malle broke the curse this story might have brought on. Beyond superstition however and outside of taking one’s own life—- there is date on the mirror and our own reflection as men when we see this film. More importantly it’s our own artistically dumbfounded face described