L'enfer (1994)

Working with an undirected script by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Nouvelle Vague auteur Claude Chabrol offers one of his typically offbeat character studies, this time exploring how jealousy can drive men (particularly rich, shallow men) literally insane. Whereas Chabrol’s initial foray into this type of material with La femme infidèle (1969) demonstrated how confirmed infidelity can ironically help heal a lifeless marriage, Clouzot’s script inverts this idea, depicting how unrealized suspicion of infidelity can drive a good marriage to complete shambles. As the disturbed hotel owner who gradually begins to suspect that his wife is sleeping with every guest in their inn, François Cluzet provides an effective, believable performance, even as his character’s erratic behavior grows increasingly comedic in its deluded outbursts of emotion; Emmanuelle Béart, on the other hand, is not asked to do much more than look beautiful and unapproachable, which might be just as well considering her function in the film as a continuous object of jealousy (although, in all fairness, she does exhibit some human dimensions in the film’s final third, right when Cluzet’s character loses all sense of rationality). As always with Chabrol, what the director does with location, mood, and his mise en scène in general is just as provocative as anything he does with his characters—here making wonderful use of Lake Saint-Ferreol in Lauraguais, France, and particularly the central hotel, which Chabrol transforms into an interior, psychological universe as intense and full of suggestive nuances as anything in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Most intriguing of all, however, is Chabrol’s mathematical expression of time as a variable inversely proportional to jealousy: the more Cluzet’s character suspects his wife of cheating on him, the slower Chabrol paces his film’s sequence of events, until, in the bravura finale, time seems to stop altogether, with Cluzet’s character stuck in an eternal nightmare of looping suspicion.