The Fire Within
Le feu follet
Synopsis
Writer Alain Leroy is having a course of treatment in a private hospital because of his problem with alcohol. After deciding to end his life, he leaves the hospital and spends the next twenty-four hours visiting his friends in Paris one last time. Will he find a reason to continue living?
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Critics reviews
Malle’s film is much more an evocation of the feeling of hopeless dismay than a documentary recreation of its realities. Things flow much more abstrusely, and the narrative often seems to be operating just outside the functional limits of reality; at its most extreme it feels like the dream of a dying man, his consciousness floating off into the ether, reaching back down to the earth he’s leaving behind.
Jesse Cataldo
March 17, 2013
When all is said and done, and all the cultural cross-references have been endlessly sifted, The Fire Within remains a very trivial film by a very presumptuous director. Malle’s self-pity here is even more boring than Fellini’s in 8 1/2 and his personal confession equally unsolicited.
Andrew Sarris
February 27, 1964
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