Director Jean-Luc Godard has famously said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. I would like to think that one of his contemporaries, Louis Malle, decided with The Fire Within to test this precept, as both are key to the plot of this striking work.
The gun is a sleek-looking Walther pistol that Alain Leroy has tucked away in a briefcase in his room. A depressed recovering alcoholic, Leroy plans on using it to commit suicide, a fact he states plainly and free of emotion one evening (this scene was quoted through Wes Anderson in his film The Royal Tenenbaums in the harrowing scene where Richie Tenenbaum slits his wrists).
There are many candidates for the girl sprinkled throughout this movie, but the one that seems to haunt Leroy most is his estranged wife, Carol. Their strained relationship is what sent him into a drunken spiral and landed him in a detox clinic, where he is still living despite being considered cured.
There are other women to consider, though, many of whom Leroy encounters in a long journey through Paris. As he visits them and his old haunts in the city, the deeper portrait of this troubled soul starts to surface, one that paints Leroy and many of the people his age as spiritually empty, filling the void with alcohol, drugs and casual sex.
The film is as much a devastating critique on a generational malaise that was slowly seeping into French society, as it is a heartbreaking portrait of depression. Leroy is at the mercy of the demons that still reside within him, an idea Malle visually expresses with several shots of his main character trying to force his way through an ever-flowing stream of traffic.
It isn’t easy to watch, considering the questions that Leroy and his friends mull over during the course of the film, but it is made a little easier to swallow by Maurice Ronet’s sympathetic and heartbreaking portrayal of a man unhinged. He doesn’t wallow or rail against the dying of the light, but instead marks everything through his expressive eyes and drags on his ever-present cigarette.
The film is also a testament to the genius of Malle, a director who throughout the early part of his career reflected so much of contemporary society back on his viewers, and often not in a very sympathetic light. The questions asked in this movie don’t come with easy answers, but as Malle demonstrates, demand that we ask of ourselves and of others.
Purchase The Fire Within Criterion Collection DVD on Amazon.com
The time has never been better for policy-driven documentaries, non-fiction films that hope to inspire people to change their ways or to work towards a better world. The lines of communication between the U.S. and the rest of the world is, these days, unprecedented, allowing us a glimpse at a changing climate, a variety of unfortunate human rights issues and of late natural disasters that threaten millions of lives.
