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A Disappointing Continuation

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

I've seen this film many years ago and have watched it again tonight. It is a good film about two topics that don't get much attention. We often see jealousy on the screen, but it is often weak, humorous, self-harming or benign. We see mental illness on the screen, but it is rarely combined with something like jealousy. These two elements together form a deadly cocktail.I say two, but here there are many small things that make this a recipe for disaster.The couple have, or are beginning to have, financial troubles. This adds a strain on even the healthiest marriage. - Nelly is a flirt who does things that make render even the least jealous partner jealous or suspicious. - Nelly is a liar. She lies about small things (cost of a bag, gambling), but it's enough to cause suspicion. - Paul is jealous and the thought of his wife with someone else burns him up. This is not a rare trait, but many jealous people don't have trust issues. They're jealous if they see something that bothers them, but suspicion and mistrust is its own disease. - Paul is suspicious of his wife and does not trust her at all. It does not help that Nelly flirts openly in front of him and lies to him. This fuels the problem. - Paul hallucinates and imagines things. He sees things that aren't there. - The lack of common friends or family means that the couple are in an island of their own misery. Paul has no one but customers to tell him that he's losing it. There are no parents or in- laws that could help him with his madness or, help him with the truth.The film is intentionally ambiguous with some scenes, the boat scene with Martineau which was one of the biggest catalysts to his suspicions and the loss of her necklace, which she did indeed lose, but we are unsure if it was in the attic or not. The fact is, audio/visual hallucinations, such as seeing something else on the projector screen or hearing voices from a sleeping woman are one thing, but actually picking up an item is something else. Near the end we see a really interesting montage, Hitchcock-like, a fast cut of imaginations and hallucinations. I wish the film had more of that. I'm disappointed that the film had no ending. It really had no ending, showing us a text saying "Without end" instead of giving us a conclusion. There is no way this couple could keep on going like this. The escalation from mere suspicion to battery and rape was quick, within weeks at most. This is an unsustainable relationship and an end, in one form or another, was near. It' just too bad that we didn't get one.All in all, a good film about an interesting topic or intersection of topics.7/10.

Paul, an owner of a lakeside hotel and his naturally flirtatious and beautiful wife, Nelly seems to have it all, yet beneath the rosy facade there lurks a rotting jealousy, eating away inside Paul's unbalanced mind. This is the basic premise of Claude Chabrol's adaptation of Henri-Georges Clouzot 1964 script. The film hinges on two interrelated questions. Was Nell really unfaithful with many men, or was it all in Paul's unbalanced mind? Chabrol projects these anxieties from Paul's point of view,leaving the viewer to judge if there is any substance to Paul's jealousy.The film is compelling and the acting is excellent, but we never know the real, underlying cause of Paul's frightening descent to madness because Charbol complacently skips through the early years of their marriage within the first six minutes. yet all of the sudden Paul is talking with an inner voice in his head, out of nowhere. This was one of the film's biggest weaknesses and perhaps Clouzot's original story was not "psychological" enough for Chabrol to work through in his usual, thorough fashion.Moreover, we also never know if Nelly really was unfaithful, thus compounding the ambiguity of Paul's jealousy. Sometimes the direction is deliberately vague in projecting Paul's point of view, blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy. Moreover, the 1960s feel of the script is retained by Chabrol in his modern-day remaking of the values of that era in the early 1990s. as a result, L'enfer is strangely old-fashioned in its portrayal of women and men. The sets and costumes feel anachronistic, esp Nelly and her flirty friend. Only Paul and his doctor seem to exist in the early 1990s.The open-ended existentialist non-ending,was the only way out for Chabrol and Cluzot, but perhaps by negating the climax, Chabrol did himself a disservice in not resolving the film's many ambiguities. But perhaps that's what Clouzot's intention was. All in all, the film is a celluloid embodiment of Satrte's famous line "Hell is other people".

I still think of L'Enfer as a great film, rife with psychological torment and anguish. It may not be Chabrol's best (as others have pointed out), but it is nonetheless very good. This is in my opinion also one of Beart's best performances. The cinematography is terrific, with wonderful contrasts between the idyllic, sun-drenched locale and the dark, tormented and claustrophobic emotional dimension. The plot is somewhat predictable, but the "meat" of the movie is on the psychological development of the main characters, not on "what happens next". Overall, I highly recommend this film to any fan of cinema.

This movie shouldn't have been entitled "Hell," or "Jealously," but "Martineau," because what it's about is a seemingly normal husband's (Paul) ridiculous insecurity about the possibility that his wife (Nelly) has been unfaithful with a mechanic named Martineau. Movie critics with a penchant for the psychoanalytical will talk about desire, desire of the other, transference, displacement, and projection; and might even talk about Paul's jealousy as being the paradoxical building block of his very love for Nelly. But what is really operative is that Paul's obsession begins with the realization that his mechanic friend is very handsome and gets along well with his wife Nelly. From Paul's realization that Martineau is attractive to his wife and probably other women, a whole structure of jealousy is erected that winds up making a fool of Paul in public, to his wife and child, and ultimately driving him to cut himself while shaving.