Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (L'Enfer D'Henri-Georges Clouzot) Review

It begins, as it ends, with a breakdown.

In 2005, film restoration specialist Serge Bromberg happens to get stuck for two hours in a broken elevator with Inès Clouzot. To pass the time, they discuss the various classics that Inès' late husband Henri-Georges had made (including Le Corbeau, The Wages Of Fear and Les Diaboliques), and then the widow tells Bromberg about a film that the director was never able to finish - Inferno. Born from Clouzot's personal experience of mental breakdown, this was to have been a drama about the increasingly pathological jealousy harboured by a provincial hotelier (Serge Reggiani) for his young bride (Romy Schneider), told in a bold new cinematic language that would immerse viewers into protagonist Marcel's neurotic, anxiety-filled and highly unreliable perspective.

Despite an unlimited budget, a crew of "Hollywoodian" proportions, and meticulous preparations, the shoot became mired in Clouzot's unhinged perfectionism. By the third torturous week of shooting, severe personality clashes drove leading man Serge Reggiani to storm off the set (never to return), and shortly afterwards, Clouzot suffered a heart attack, leaving the project in ruins. All that remained of the ambitious production were 185 cans of audition tapes, film tests and outdoor sequences, unopened and unseen since 1964. Fortunately Bromberg was invited to cast his eye over this soundtrack-free treasure trove, and the result is Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno - part making-of documentary, part painstaking reconstruction, part elegy for a film that never was, and part portrait of an artist tragically incapable of seeing his madness through to its end.

Following Clouzot's screenplay, notes and detailed storyboards, Bromberg and co-director Ruxandra Medrea present the existing black-and-white exterior sequences from Inferno in their proper order, filling in the silence with Jean-Guy Véran's subtle sound design and Bruno Alexiu's jazz-concrète score, and getting actors Jacques Gamblin and Bérénice Bejo to reenact Reggiani and Romy Schneider's crucial dialogue scenes in a plain studio space. Most striking of all, though, are the snatches of Marcel's deluded point of view, inspired by the voguish Op Art and kinetic art movements, and shot in full (although often luridly unnatural) colour filtered through a range of distorting lenses and in-camera optical effects.