Henri-Georges Clouzot has long been a problematic figure in the history of French cinema. Now, in the week of the release of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, a documentary chronicling his most troubled cinematic exploit, it seems a fitting time to look back at just what made Clouzot such an enigmatic and incendiary filmmaker.
A severely autocratic director, Clouzot fitted not into any of the cinematic schemes which narratise France’s cinematic development. Clouzot’s work is too esoteric and blackly misanthropic to fit into the more traditional embraces of the cinéma du papa/cinéma de qualité and the discussions around la politique des auteurs – although his ability to vivisect the layers of social pretence inherent within French provincial life could be logically linked with Chabrolian theme and form, he was never linked either to the groundswell of cinematic activity that became the more fashionable Nouvelle Vague.
Clouzot, then, operated as something of a maverick within the framework of French cinematic structures and, in doing so, found his own freedom to break the theatricality, quaint tradition and static cinematic convention in a different, perhaps more acute way than the young pups of the Nouvelle Vague who have so dominated historical cinematic appraisals. Clouzot was even barred by the French government from making films at one point, such was the offense he had caused and, unusually for an artist, he drew the wrath of the French Resistance, who accused him of making pro-German works.
His best known films are probably Quai des Orfèvres (the address of a famous Parisian cop shop), Le Salaire de la Peur, Le Corbeau (incidentally one of the film’s Tarantino had playing at Shosanna’s cinema in Inglourious Basterds, and seemingly a touchstone text for Michael Haneke’s imminent arrival the White Ribbon) and the film I want to revisit here – Les Diaboliques.
All these films have been mercilessly ploughed for content and structure over the years – Fatal Attraction is just one of the more famous magpies – and a couple have been remade several times; the most infamous rehash being the Sharon Stone, Isabelle Adjani and Chazz Palminteri starring Diabolique.
Clouzot’s original, though, is something to behold. Based on a novel She Who Was No More by the French noir authors Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (two authors who Alfred Hitchcock also adapted for Vertigo). Interestingly, Clouzot reverses the sexual triangle within the novel, which, at the time would have been a prime piece of Mail-bait.
Les Diaboliques is a film from which menace seeps at every pore. Starring Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse and a startlingly fragile Véra Clouzot (the director’s wife who had a genuinely weak heart to match that of her character), Les Diaboliques is the story of a privately run boarding school out in the country where the despotic headmaster Michel (played by by an ogre-like Meurisse) psychologically and physically browbeats his wife Christina (Véra Clouzot) and his mistress (Signoret). The wife and mistress subsequently conspire to off their tormentor and do so by drugging and drowning him. After hiding his body in the leaf-strewn swimming pool outside the school, they hope that his body will be discovered and his death assumed accidental. However, the next day when the pool is drained, the body has vanished and soon the suit that Michel was wearing at the point of his death, is returned anonymously from the dry-cleaners.
The film, like the best psychological horror, relies largely on an encroaching dread, an intensely gradual pace, a gaping and supremely disconcerting void of musical accompaniment and a heavy, sustained off-screen presence which is only visually realised in the final few frames. It is an ending now much copied but still retains much of its genuinely creepy sense of the macabre and jet black wit to match.
Set during a damp, mouldy autumn, the squelch of the sodden leaves is tangible and aligns well with the decaying walls and surrounds of the boarding house. Entropy has long since set in here; the brooding, gloomy tone is aided by a frozen, rigid camera which often plunges from on-high and is accompanied by intricately weaved chiaroscuro lighting alternately exposing and disguising the gothic confines of the boarding house. Our instinctive desire for the camera to move, to show and to tell is consistently denied. The smell, too, of grimy, unwashed children wafts from the screen and the viewer is left at the close with a profoundly disturbing residual unease.
Véra Clouzot, in her debut role, is seriously put through the emotional wringer by her husband and king puppeteer. Already suffering from the cold shoulders provoked by the apparently nepotistic casting, her awkward manner, inelastic body language and capacity for taut facial expression seem to denote her genuine terror at taking on the role. They contribute hugely to the efficacy of the film. The final few scenes of the film are something of a coup de grâce for her character and her weak heart. Tragically, five years later her real heart finally gave out on her, a coincidence which was made much of at the time by the French press.
The film was released during France’s ‘dirty’ war with Algeria and it has been suggested that it is an indirect commentary on just that. This again connects Clouzot to Haneke who, with a contemporary set of cinematic tools, also tackled this subject in Hidden. It is curious, then, that these two masters of manipulation are currently enjoying a moment in the critical sun.
