Recent winner for Best Documentary at the Césars (the French Oscars), Serge Bromberg’s and Ruxandra Medrea’s Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno has been picked up theatrically for the play in the U.S. (via The Flicker Alley – I never heard of you guys) – I’m imagining a traveling, art-house circuit release for the doc – or if you can call it that, as its a construction of Clouzot’s original, unfinished vision, filling the gaps with interviews, re-enactments and Clouzot’s own notes and storyboards.
In 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot chose 26 years-old Romy Schneider and 42 years-old Serge Reggiani, to be the leads of L’ENFER. An enigmatic and original project; an unlimited budget; a film, which was meant to be the cinematographic event at its release. However, after 3 weeks into filming, drama happens. The project is interrupted and the images, which were told to be “incredible”, will never be shown. I have recovered those images that were forgotten for half a century and they are more mind-blowing than the legend predicted. They are telling a unique film, that of madness and jealousy filmed from a subjective point of view, the story of a cursed filming and that of Henri-Georges Clouzot, who had set free his mad film making talent. Romy Schneider has never been so beautiful and magnetic. Never a director has been so close to the hero he invented. Our film shows L’ENFER such as it was shot and tells the emotional story of a magnificent failure.
