A PROLOGUE

When I think of The Fire Within, I’ll always remember this.

Some years ago I was doing some writings in Palestine. At the end of one workday I had some drinks with two journalists at a bar in Ramallah, in the West Bank. The bar had a swimming pool.

My two companions were French, a man and a woman soon to be married. I’ll give them names: Marie and François. At one point, François went swimming. Marie and I talked about books we like. She wanted to know what French novels I had read. She’s a nice person, but she’s French, so there was some sardonic follow-up like, People who aren’t French only ever read Camus, Sartre, and Céline. I have another odd story related to this, but I’ll put that here.

Anyway, chance had it that one of the few books I had in my apartment at the time was Will o’ the Wisp by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Original French title: Le Feu Follet. I’d gone and sought this book out and paid more for it than I usually pay for books because I had become obsessed with the film we’re talking about now. The film was released in English as The Fire Within, but ‘Will o’ the Wisp’ is the actual translation of Le Feu Follet. It’s an interesting title so I’ve written something else about it).

So, Marie. Something odd happened to her when I said the book. Plastic reclining poolside chairs, and she sort of half sat up and half-spilled a drink and was caught at this odd angle, and it was odd. I said the film was special. She looked to the water where François was still swimming. He swam with a grace uncommon.

Then she said, ‘He watches it once each month’.

I said, ‘Are you sure you want to marry him?’

She smiled, as though death were a toy he played with sometimes.

BACKGROUND

La Rochelle wrote his novel in 1931. It’s based on the life, or rather death, of his friend, the Dadaist poet Jacques Rigaut. Rigaut was openly obsessed with suicide, and he killed himself in 1929, about a year and a half before Le Feu Follet was published.

THE FILM

The plot of the book is simple, as is the film. Both span the course of a day. Both open with the same scene, a scene that encapsulates theme of the film. The protagonist, Alain (Maurice Ronet), is in bed with his lover, Lydia (Léna Skerla). They look at one another intently. Emblemising the auteur concept of the French New Wave, a narrator speaks as they are silent. Following closely the opening lines of the novel, the narrator asks what each is looking for in staring so intently at the other.

This is the film’s refrain: how can one feel connected to another, and how can one feel connected to the world? It becomes apparent that Alain has resigned himself to the fact that he cannot feel this connection, that it is not real. In his resignation, he has written the intended date of his suicide on the mirror in his room. The date is July 23, and almost the entirety of the film takes place on July 22.

Alain is staying in a clinic, being treated for alcoholism. The film is notably different from the book, in which Alain is being treated for a heroin addiction. Some speculation: perhaps heroin was replaced with alcohol to make Alain’s vice, and by inference his existential woe, more relatable.

The film meanders as Alain spends time in his room, considering objects: photographs, chess pieces, a gun. It is as though he wants to feel the solidity of things, but cannot.

He leaves the clinic and spends the day visiting old friends. The film is conversations. It is clear he is loved and valued by many, but he is cynical of the authenticity of all: family, friendship, romance.

He gets drunk at a party. The ugliness of his cynicism breaks out, but still friends assure him he is loved.

He returns to the clinic. He wakes and sets his belongings in order, as though he is packing to leave. He has a last phone call with his friend Solange, whom he promised the previous evening to visit for lunch the next day. She asks if she can count on him. She tells him he has a heart. He tells her he understands nothing. He hangs up.

He shoots himself in the heart.

IS IT A GOOD FILM?

Le Feu Follet is a superb film. Perhaps even more deftly than does its source material, it offers deep insight into an essential hardship of the human condition, without glorifying it and without obscuring its truth, a truth that must be felt rather than known. To be clear, the truth is not whether suicide is right or wrong. It is that meaning is difficult to difficult to know, to feel, to touch.

The final lines of the novel make this quite clear: ‘A revolver is solid, it is made of steel. It is an object. To come up against an object at last’.

Le Feu Follet is less pretentious than many of its French contemporaries. It doesn’t seek to resolve Camus’ famous opening to The Myth of Sisyphus (1942): ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide’.

Suicide is of course all throughout the film. It’s written on the wall. But the languorous, sensitive direction of the film as it follows Alain through the world suggests not a reasoning for his death but an empathy for his life. Ronet’s rendering of the protagonist, too, is excellent in its subtlety. He never overplays the part, never devolves into a caricature of the doomed pariah, whether deeply brooding or feverishly maniacal.

It's not hard to imagine a film where Alain played such a character. In a way, the Michel of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless is as suicidal as Alain, and where Alain tries to feel the touch of life as he ponderously touches a chessboard, Michel grips hard the steering wheel of a car, onward to an amorous liaison, escape, a searing fate.

But Malle’s is a different film, and it is worthwhile for the difference it offers us.

A final note on the philosophy of suicide. Something in the film that is not in the book is that, in the moments before Alain kills himself, he finishes reading a book, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The poignant final lines of Fitzgerald’s novel are, by now, immortal: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’. Somewhat less remembered is the fact that these very words are written on his tombstone (Fitzgerald was an alcoholic and severely depressed, but he died of a heart attack, not suicide).

So, there is a poignant irony that Alain reads these final words about beating on, even against the current, but does the very opposite and ends it all. Perhaps in this irony Malle is offering some optimism of his own. Maybe, at an indulgent stretch, his Gatsby reference was influenced by those famous last lines of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953): ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on’.

Well, the film did not go on. It ends with the gunshot. Not quite. First, a close-up of Alain’s face afterward. And then words upon the screen, seemingly a suicide note, actual or imagined: ‘I’m killing myself because you didn’t love me, because I didn’t love you. Because our ties were loose, I’m killing myself to tighten them. I leave you with an indelible stain’. Make of those words what you will.

La Rochelle provides no suicide note, but there is something of a postscript to the novel, a bitter farewell to his friend Rigaut, both fond and scathing. It philosophises suicide with the kind of heavy hand I’ve said was admirably absent from the film. But he is writing to his friend, who has left him, and there ought not be judgement of his attempt to make sense of that.

I CAN’T GO ON

In its simplicity and, I think, near perfect execution, Le Feu Follet doesn’t seem to be the kind of film solicitous of a re-make. Though not quite a re-make so much as a new film inspired by both the previous film and the book before it, in 2011 Joachim Trier directed the Norwegian film Oslo, August 31st. It’s its own film, and it is excellent, so I will write a separate review for it here.

I’LL GO ON

I did not see too much more of Marie and François. Transient world. But a last note.

I would like to think of François’ obsession with the film optimistically: not that he felt nothing of the world, as Alain, but that he appreciated that his ability to feel the world was fleeting and tenuous.

If you ever read these words, I hope the wedding was grand and that you are happy.