0 The Lovers (1958)

***
Country: France
Director: Louis Malle

Even though Louis Malle was a contemporary of Truffaut, Godard, and Resnais and began directing films in the late 1950s, just as the New Wave began to dominate French filmmaking, I've never really thought of him as part of that movement. His first movie, Elevator to the Gallows (1957), with its nod to the anarchy of American films like They Live by Night and Gun Crazy in its subplot of young punks on a crime spree, did bear a resemblance to the early work of Godard and Truffaut. But his next projects were all quite different from one another—what David Thomson refers to as his "moving rather aimlessly from one subject to another"—and for the rest of his long career he never seemed to settle into a favored theme or easily identifiable style. The Lovers strikes me as almost his version of the Douglas Sirk women's pictures of the 1950s and reminds me in some ways of the film I think of as the archetypal Sirk movie of that kind, All That Heaven Allows.

The credits of The Lovers open over a map, which looks as though it might date from an earlier century, of an estate with a large lake labeled Lac de l'Indifférence in the the middle (the Criterion website identifies this as the Carte du tendre, "a 'map' of amorous relations drawn by Madeleine de Scudéry in the seventeenth century"), and with sensuous music of Brahms playing on the soundtrack. In some ways, the movie plays like an update of a romantic novel of the 19th century—Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, for example. (According to various sources, the film is loosely derived from a French novel, Point de Lendemain by Dominique Vivant, published in 1777.) In The Lovers, Jeanne Moreau plays a character not unlike Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, Jeanne Tournier, the young wife of an older man, Henri Tournier (Alain Cuny), the publisher of the major newspaper in Dijon. Trapped in a dull, loveless marriage to a man engrossed in his career and marooned in a remote country house, Jeanne is the epitome of the bored, neglected, and aimless upper middle-class housewife.

1 The Fire Within (1963)

****
Country: France
Director: Louis Malle

Louis Malle's The Fire Within begins in medias res when we meet the main character, Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet), in a hotel where he has spent the night with a former girl friend. As the film unfolds, more is gradually revealed about Alain. We learn that he is a recovering alcoholic, a patient at what appears to be a very swank private sanatorium in Versailles, just outside Paris. The fees are being paid by his rich wife, who lives in New York and from whom he is separated. When his doctor tells him the cure is complete and it is time to leave, Alain insists he wants to stay at the clinic, that without its regimen to restrain him, he believes he will immediately begin drinking again. Alain's cryptic comments to the doctor about the futility of his life and about death suggest he is suicidally depressed, something which seems quite plain to the viewer but which his doctor dismisses with upbeat platitudes. Later, alone in his room, he opens his brief case, takes out a pistol wrapped in a handkerchief, and contemplates it before putting it back, then walks to the mirror, on which he has written the date July 23, and looks at himself. There can be little doubt about his intentions.

The rest of the film follows Alain through his last day, as he goes to Paris and looks up old friends before returning to the clinic. From these encounters we discover more about him—that he is a writer who is no longer able to write, has been involved in the war in Algeria, has led a dissolute life among rich bohemians, that he invariably rejects suggestions of ways he might repair his life. We also learn that he is well-liked by his friends and that quite a few attractive women—and even some men—find him sexually appealing, while others find his spiritual torpor merely pathetic. Yet even as these details about his life accumulate and our picture of him becomes more complete, one thing is unchanging: our sense of the hopeless, unshakable despair he feels.