L’Enfer

Claude Chabrol has a tilt at the Clouzot project that could famously not be finished; 1994
This starts off pretty well. The broiling summer heat is in place, as are the hot but washed out clothes. The script is fast and simple. There are also more dynamic framings than usual, with heads barely or not fitting into frames, and some genuine tension.
The non-linear stuff here starts off fine, but does descend into a pretty unthoughout line of ‘he’s crazy, you know’. What is the difference between Clouzot and Chabrol? One imagines Clouzot’s film would have represented a universal relation, tried to examine a universal of sexual affair. Chabrol’s however, turns into simply a rather unbelievable little story that means next to nothing and becomes very boring. Apart from older versus newer cinema, why?
It may partly be that Chabrol’s quick camera moves and framing utterly lack restraint. As does the acting, which never emotes when it could overemote. It quickly becomes trivial. The story just becomes stupid. Worse is how it constantly repeats itself; the same one theme is repeated again, and again, and again... without really being developed.
Their aren’t the visual pyrotechnics here that Clouzot promised, nor the slightly restrained sense that would give a kind of universal pathos. Not that Clouzot was any great master, but it would surely have been superior to this. It ends up revelling in an uncritically appraised look at a man torturing a women, unjustified by logic and unnecessary. There is nothing remotely stylish about that.