Few things titillate film obsessives more than the masterpieces that never were. How many geeky conversations have you gotten into or overheard that begin with “Well, if Stanley Kubrick had actually done ‘Napoleon’….” History is littered with films that could have been special had they, you know, been made. And “Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno” is a fascinating peek at a potential masterpiece by the French Hitchcock. It’s hard to say whether or not “Inferno” would have changed the way people watch or make movies, but it certainly could have.
The story of “Inferno” was basically a simple tale about Marcel, a hotelier (Serge Reggiani) who becomes consumed by an obsession for his young wife Odette (the unbelievably gorgeous Romy Schneider), leading himself to believe that she is carrying on an affair with someone in the resort where they live. There isn’t much “story” to Clouzot’s film, but as the lovingly assembled documentary by directors Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea shows (utilizing footage from some 15 reels of raw footage they acquired thanks to a chance encounter with Clouzot’s wife in an elevator) the director was instead attempting a visual approximation of the extreme sensation of jealousy. It’s an amazing conceit, especially for a director known for his taut, suspenseful narratives in films like “Wages of Fear” and “Diabolique” and he employed a whole variety of experimental techniques to try and achieve his ambitious goal. Sometimes he would use colored lights that would swirl around Schneider, sometimes he would dip her into glitter or some brightly hued paint. These tests alone are captivating, and by the time the documentary wraps up, you absolutely feel like Clouzot could’ve made something special. But alas, it was never to be.
Clouzot was given an extraordinary amount of latitude by Columbia Pictures and that appears to have been his downfall. The director soon began spending an inordinate amount of time on endless visual experiments and test footage. The production soon grew to employ three crews and well over 100 technicians pretty much working on rotation as the insomniac Clouzot would often work or get inspired late at night. Shooting on the actual film slowed to a crawl as Clouzot shot take after take after take of the same scene, seemingly without knowing what he wanted. The situation soon became tense between Clouzot and his lead actor; the director suffered a heart attack and after three weeks the film was shut down forever. One almost wonders, had Clouzot not been given such free reign, if he would’ve been able to deliver the film. But “Inferno” makes the case that unbridled creative control ended up stifling the production, instead of moving it forward.
In order to help us visualize what “Inferno” might’ve ended up like, the filmmakers have actors act out scenes from Clouzot’s original script. It’s pretty abrasive at first but then comes together as yet another way in which we can sort of, kind of, maybe, if we squint just right, see what this movie would have been had it come together. That said, without the truly dazzling visuals its really hard to tell just how different and emotionally textured Clouzot’s finished work might have been. But, it’s the intoxicating combination of all these elements (interviews, actual footage, and dramatic readings) that make the documentary so spellbinding. Bit by bit we’re shown more, until we really feel like we know what his intentions were, and how genuinely powerful they could have been.
In the end, though, “Inferno” is about obsessions — the jealousy that drives Marcel in Clouzot’s “Inferno,” and the singular creative vision that ends up devouring the filmmaker himself. It’s hard to know how “Inferno” might’ve turned out or even how the highly experimental film would’ve been received had it hit theaters in the mid-to-late 1960s. Interestingly, in 1994, Claude Chabrol filmed Clouzot’s script as “Hell,” with Emmanuelle Beart in the Schneider role. It didn’t make much of an impact, but then again, it didn’t have Clouzot behind it either. But thanks to this wonderful documentary, we’re able to peek inside and see what Clouzot’s dream looked like and ponder, just for a second, what it would have been like if it came true. [A]