Director Louis Malle's adaptation of novelist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's The Fire Within is a grim character study. Expertly directed and brilliantly acted, it features Maurice Ronet in the lead role of Alain Leroy, a thirty-something Parisian author who fell a little too far into the bottle for his own good. He finds himself tossed into a treatment center in Versailles courtesy of his wife, who lives overseas in New York City. She decides to send a mutual acquaintance to check in on him and make sure that he's doing alright, and she's relived to learn that the doctors have decided that Alain is well enough to be discharged. While all seems well on the surface, Alain is far from mentally fit, in fact he's just as miserable and depressed as he's always been only now he doesn't have the booze to numb the pain.

He heads back to Paris and meets up with a couple of old friends but nothing is really clicking for him and he's more or less resigned himself to taking his own life in twenty-four hours' time. With that in mind, why shouldn't he reunite with a few pals and maybe have one last fling or two before he ends it all?

Almost clinical in its execution, The Fire Within benefits immensely from Ronet's chillingly believable performance as the tortured former socialite who is just about ready to give it all up. He's pushed his wife away with his drinking and most of his friends as well and he knows he has only himself to blame. He's self destructive in the worst kind of way and we have no problem believing and to a very strong degree understanding his suicidal tendencies.

Working wonderfully in conjunction with Ronet's lead performance is Malle's careful and calculated direction. The picture is deliberately paced and perfectly edited in such a way that it really allows Alain's story to unfold in a very desperate manner. The audience, like Alain, is left waiting for something, anything, to put the spark back into his bane existence. This creates a fair bit of honest tension and palpable atmosphere at times reaching an almost existential level. Malle's Paris is an empty, lifeless city offering Alain nothing of substance to make his life appealing any longer. The city's dense population fares no better, they offer nothing of interest to Alain, and we see this through the various hollow interactions that Malle puts Alain through. Eric Satie's score compliment's the beautiful black and white cinematography very nicely as well.

The result is a fascinating and genuinely bittersweet picture that shows how far one person can fall despite the best efforts of those around him to put him on the straight and narrow. Alain knows his friends and lovers went on with out him during his time in the clinic and he knows that if he kills himself they'll go on without him again. The film winds up asking more questions than it answers but is an engrossing and rewarding experience never the less.

Video:

Criterion presents The Fire Within in a nice 1.66.1 anamorphic widescreen presentation with black bars on the left and right hand side of the frame. The black and white image is nice and crisp and while it does show a bit of very natural looking film grain and the odd small speck of print damage here and there, for the most part it is a very clean, clear image. There aren't any problems with edge enhancement or mpeg compression artifacts nor is there an overabundance of aliasing or shimmering effects. This is a very film like transfer with a lot of foreground and background detail in it that leaves very little to complain about.