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The Fire Within (Le Feu Follet)

Melancholy, Angst-Ridden Louis Malle Film Stars Maurice Ronet

Jun 12, 2008

Also starring Jeanne Moreau and featuring a poignant soundtrack by Erik Satie, Le Feu Follet is a masterful study in anxiety, depression and loss.

The Premise of The Fire Within

Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet, who also starred with Jeanne Moreau in Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows) has just turned 30. A life of glamorous debauchery has taken its toll on his looks and left him an alcoholic.

We meet Alain as he is preparing to brave the real world once again after drying out for several months in a sanatorium.

When Alain’s doctor asks him if he still has the same anxieties, he responds, “Not anxieties, doctor---an anxiety. One perpetual anxiety.”

The film proceeds to introduce us to Alain’s anxieties, which are manifold. He is troubled by:

Turning 30 and entering an enforced adulthood
Money and his lack of it
A loosely formed marriage to a rich American, a union that doesn’t preclude
Abortive relationships/flirtations with other women

Ultimately, as the film shows us, Alain’s perpetual anxiety is his inability to grasp and to be grasped by life; his anguish at being, as he sees it, a bad lover and therefore badly loved.

Alain’s Choices in Le Feu Follet

The movie takes place in a single day, during which Alain reconnects with various friends, each of whom represents a possible life of adulthood for Alain that would supersede his earlier jazz-age existence. During the course of the day we meet:

His wife’s best friend, with whom he’s having an affair that could potentially lead to more
An intellectual who has, to Alain’s amused disgust, found joy in domesticity with a woman and her daughters
A gallery owner, played by Jeanne Moreau, who has survived the deaths of several of her artist friends and still lives among a fringe group of angry artists
An haut bourgeois couple whose dinner party Alain attends and who try, despite his bewildering behavior, to reach out to him in his despair

Louis Malle's Filmmaking Choices in The Fire Within

In this extraordinary film, Malle expresses the depth of Alain’s existential solitude, depression and angst by filming long interludes where Ronet silently observes things or people as we observe him in his reactions.

In a masterful stroke, these interludes are punctuated by poignant music by Erik Satie, notably Trois Gnossiennes and Trois Gymnopedies.

In one eight-minute scene at the sanatorium, for example, as we watch Alain fiddle restlessly among his possessions (an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel fittingly among them) we discover, succinctly, exactly what his preoccupations are and have been.

Ronet’s expressive face and demeanor, so perfectly suited to the recovered alcoholic, register every internal wound. The scene is, in the words of Satie’s piano directions for Trois Gymnopedies, lent et douloureux: slow and sad.

Defining Le Feu Follet

The French title, "Le Feu Follet," means “will-o’-the wisp,” -- ignis fatuus, or foolish fire, which Merriam-Webster defines as “a light that sometimes appears in the night over marshy ground and is often attributable to the combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter.”

The “foolish fire” defines Alain physically--he is a wreck who is yet charming and delightful--and psychically, in his chagrin at the loss of an ephemeral youth.

His inner state and his sense of life are equally defined by this foolish fire, as Alain repeatedly laments being unable to grasp love. He views himself as too insubstantial to inspire the lasting love that he craves, or to break out of his paralysis sufficiently to seize life, to create a meaningful existence for himself.

Sadly, the U.S. translation of the title, “The Fire Within,” with its connotation of passion and “fire in the belly,” is the exact opposite of what’s intended by the original title. In fact, the 80s film title “St. Elmo’s Fire” comes much closer to the intended meaning.

Art Imitates Life: Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Author of Le Feu Follet

Louis Malle adapted this 1963 film from Drieu La Rochelle’s 1931 novella, which was itself inspired by the 1929 suicide, at age 30, of the author’s friend, Dadaist poet Jacques Rigaut. Rigaut had previously announced that he would kill himself at 30.

Drieu la Rochelle was a Nazi collaborator with the Vichy regime during World War II. He wrote numerous essays about his disillusionment with France’s political direction and its global position, problems that he felt could be solved only by fascism.

Although briefly married to a Jewish woman, he was also, his writings indicate, anti-Semitic. When the liberation of France made it clear that fascism would never take hold, Drieu la Rochelle, like his friend Rigaut, killed himself in 1945.

The copyright of the article The Fire Within (Le Feu Follet) in Film Dramas Based on Books is owned by Sara Churchville. Permission to republish The Fire Within (Le Feu Follet) in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.