L’ENFER

L’ENFER (Directed by Claude Chabrol. Starring Emmanuelle Béart, Francois Cluzet)

Although Claude Chabrol’s films have been of varied quality (to say the least), his best work (significantly Le Boucher, but also to a lesser extent films like Les Biches and Coq au Vin) has evoked Hitchcock with an emphasis on the psychology of suspense and none of the tricksy pastiche of De Palma and other imitators. L’Enfer is an unfilmed script by another French master of suspense, Henri-Georges Cluzout (The Wages Of Fear, Les Diaboliques), which plays to Chabrol’s film-making strengths, a thriller that turns out to be more psychological than actual.

Francois Cluzet and Emanuelle Béart are Paul and Nelly, a happily married couple leading an idyllic life running a picaresque lakeside hotel, until little idiosyncrasies gradually begin to persuade Paul that his wife is cheating on him. Chabrol takes us on a jealous journey, with vivid close-ups, sound distortions and a general sense of dislocation gradually blurring the line between what is reality, and the character’s perception of it. The leads give fine performances (Béart notably better in Chabrol’s hands than she has been in the sub-Hitchcockian work of her husband Roman Polanski) and there are sequences of stunning film-making (notably long stretches in which Paul follows his wife), although without the twists and turns one might expect if Hitchcock himself (or even, for that matter, Cluzout) had been at the helm, the one note nature of this study in obsession may leave a niggling sense of dissatisfaction at the conclusion. Still, for all its photogenic beauty, this may be the most hellish vision of rural France ever committed to Celluloid.