Reading M’Cheyne; 1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 55: L’enfer (Torment)
If you follow M’Cheyne’s reading plan, then every so often, by coincidence, you’ll encounter some pretty stark juxtaposition. Yesterday I read Ezekiel 32, in which Egypt repeatedly is cursed to “lie among the uncircumcised.” Yes, it’s better to be circumcised, I couldn’t help thinking. But then I came to Galatians 5, which says that “if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you … in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything.” Oh, snap.
I’ve read these passages before, of course; and I know that no one passage should be interpreted apart from the rest of the Bible. But there’s something to be said for reading a passage naïvely, as if it were unfamiliar. The power of the M’Cheyne plan is that it allows you to approximate this state of mind while recalling other parts of the Bible (because you’ve just read them). Everything feels more fresh. It’s one thing to hear Paul rail against circumcision; it’s another to hear him when you’ve just gone through a passage like Ezekiel 32 in which uncircumcision is abhorred.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
2 Samuel and 1 Kings also have been on the schedule lately.
Gripping, hardboiled stuff.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
L’enfer
I can’t figure out why Kanopy lists this among its movies of 1996. It was shown in France in 1994, and that’s when it was reviewed in the USA, so that’s when it must have been in theaters here.
Call it an honorary ninety-sixer.
Nasty old Claude Chabrol remakes an unfinished movie by Henri-George Clouzot (director of Diabolique, The Wages of Fear, etc.). It’s the flip-side of those “French people on vacation for weeks and weeks” movies, the kind that Éric Rohmer does so well. L’enfer is about the hoteliers, not the guests. For these characters, there is no vacation, no regeneration, not even in the off-season. Nevertheless, the owner’s wife (Emmanuelle Béart) disappears a lot when she’s supposed to be working. She’s beautiful. Her husband (François Cluzet) suspects that she is cheating on him. He walks down to the dock of their pleasant but hardly splendid little lake, and mutters to himself. The guests notice; the hotel staff notice; his doctor notices. His wife? “You’re jealous!” she gleefully taunts him, and runs off to the shower. As if she didn’t see that he’s coming apart at the seams.
If there’s a common theme in Chabrol’s work, it might be this: some people get their kicks egging others on.
(Isn’t that the basis of a lot of horror? Of Wake in Fright, for example? Of Neil LaBute’s infamous movies? Of Shakespeare’s Iago? Of the serpent in the garden? The satanic impulse isn’t just to ruin; it’s to persuade others to freely ruin themselves – to entice them to enslave or mutilate their own flesh.)
She flirts; she provokes. She literally drives her husband mad. Or maybe she’s just being friendly with the guests. It’s unclear whether she really is unchaste or even flirtatious: certain scenes must be entirely inside her husband’s head; possibly, others are, too. There’s no firm basis for the viewer to assign guilt or innocence to the wife. As for the husband, the evidence he has is ambiguous at best. So he is always trying to gather more evidence, spying upon his wife, questioning her. He wears her out. She threatens to really cheat on him if he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t stop.
Is he deliberately provoking her, then? Is he dragging her down into his hell with him?
Is this what she wanted all along? That’s what Roger Ebert suggests, on the premise that the movie needs this extra level of perversity to be interesting.
Well, I doubt the movie is meant to be interesting. It’s meant to be pretty. It’s meant to keep the viewer endlessly, fruitlessly guessing the wife’s real motives, as the husband must do.
Ambiguity is the task that some movies set for themselves. This one ends with a caption: SANS FIN. Without end. That’s ambiguous, too. Does this movie conclude like No Exit, in which the characters are in an unending hell? Or does it conclude like Last Year at Marienbad, with no resolution, no determinate meaning, no point: is it just an exercise in stringing the viewer along?
Or is the torment of uncertainty the attraction of the movie, as in “The Lady, or the Tiger?” Some people like to be frustrated. They seek it out. Maybe the husband in L’enfer does this. Maybe the wife does. Maybe, especially, the sort of person who watches a lot of movies by Claude Chabrol likes to be frustrated. Who’s the pervert, then?
I’ve read these passages before, of course; and I know that no one passage should be interpreted apart from the rest of the Bible. But there’s something to be said for reading a passage naïvely, as if it were unfamiliar. The power of the M’Cheyne plan is that it allows you to approximate this state of mind while recalling other parts of the Bible (because you’ve just read them). Everything feels more fresh. It’s one thing to hear Paul rail against circumcision; it’s another to hear him when you’ve just gone through a passage like Ezekiel 32 in which uncircumcision is abhorred.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
2 Samuel and 1 Kings also have been on the schedule lately.
King David was old and advanced in years; and although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm. So his servants said to him, “Let a young virgin be sought for my lord the king, and let her wait on the king, and be his attendant; let her lie in your bosom, so that my lord the king may be warm.” So they searched for a beautiful girl throughout all the territory of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king. The girl was very beautiful. She became the king’s attendant and served him, but the king did not know her sexually.In the same chapter, David talks with Bathsheba – whom, long ago, he took for himself because he desired to do so – who now must “[bow] and [do] obeisance to the king” to plead for her life and her son’s, while beautiful young Abishag is in the room “attending the king.”
Gripping, hardboiled stuff.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
L’enfer
I can’t figure out why Kanopy lists this among its movies of 1996. It was shown in France in 1994, and that’s when it was reviewed in the USA, so that’s when it must have been in theaters here.
Call it an honorary ninety-sixer.
Nasty old Claude Chabrol remakes an unfinished movie by Henri-George Clouzot (director of Diabolique, The Wages of Fear, etc.). It’s the flip-side of those “French people on vacation for weeks and weeks” movies, the kind that Éric Rohmer does so well. L’enfer is about the hoteliers, not the guests. For these characters, there is no vacation, no regeneration, not even in the off-season. Nevertheless, the owner’s wife (Emmanuelle Béart) disappears a lot when she’s supposed to be working. She’s beautiful. Her husband (François Cluzet) suspects that she is cheating on him. He walks down to the dock of their pleasant but hardly splendid little lake, and mutters to himself. The guests notice; the hotel staff notice; his doctor notices. His wife? “You’re jealous!” she gleefully taunts him, and runs off to the shower. As if she didn’t see that he’s coming apart at the seams.
If there’s a common theme in Chabrol’s work, it might be this: some people get their kicks egging others on.
(Isn’t that the basis of a lot of horror? Of Wake in Fright, for example? Of Neil LaBute’s infamous movies? Of Shakespeare’s Iago? Of the serpent in the garden? The satanic impulse isn’t just to ruin; it’s to persuade others to freely ruin themselves – to entice them to enslave or mutilate their own flesh.)
She flirts; she provokes. She literally drives her husband mad. Or maybe she’s just being friendly with the guests. It’s unclear whether she really is unchaste or even flirtatious: certain scenes must be entirely inside her husband’s head; possibly, others are, too. There’s no firm basis for the viewer to assign guilt or innocence to the wife. As for the husband, the evidence he has is ambiguous at best. So he is always trying to gather more evidence, spying upon his wife, questioning her. He wears her out. She threatens to really cheat on him if he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t stop.
Is he deliberately provoking her, then? Is he dragging her down into his hell with him?
Is this what she wanted all along? That’s what Roger Ebert suggests, on the premise that the movie needs this extra level of perversity to be interesting.
Well, I doubt the movie is meant to be interesting. It’s meant to be pretty. It’s meant to keep the viewer endlessly, fruitlessly guessing the wife’s real motives, as the husband must do.
Ambiguity is the task that some movies set for themselves. This one ends with a caption: SANS FIN. Without end. That’s ambiguous, too. Does this movie conclude like No Exit, in which the characters are in an unending hell? Or does it conclude like Last Year at Marienbad, with no resolution, no determinate meaning, no point: is it just an exercise in stringing the viewer along?
Or is the torment of uncertainty the attraction of the movie, as in “The Lady, or the Tiger?” Some people like to be frustrated. They seek it out. Maybe the husband in L’enfer does this. Maybe the wife does. Maybe, especially, the sort of person who watches a lot of movies by Claude Chabrol likes to be frustrated. Who’s the pervert, then?
