Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

Director: Ruxandra Medrea, Serge Bromberg

2009 / 94min / DCP

Clouzot began filming his Inferno—the story of a middle-aged provincial hotelier (Serge Reggiani) tormented by jealousy and covetousness and the much younger wife (Schneider) who is the subject of his gnawing obsession—with a bottomless budget from Columbia Pictures but shut down production after three weeks of fraught shooting capped by the director’s sidelining with a heart attack. What remained was several reels of extraordinary Op Art-inspired images—Clouzot’s interest in the movement would resurface in his 1968 La Prisonnière—which form the basis of this essay-film/postmortem, in which 26-year-old Schneider appears, in scenes approximating the Reggiani character’s feverish fantasies, as a figure of bewitching and sinister sensuality.

Distributor: FPA Classics