Want to watch a film containing the most despicable excuse for a human being? Watch L’Enfer and understand why it translates to ‘Hell’, since that’s exactly what it felt like watching it. Not because it was bad, but because Chabrol helps craft a skin-crawling story of emotional abuse and creates probably my least favourite character of all time. That’s in terms of how emotionally I reacted to him, not because he was badly written. I pondered if this was hyperbole and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t: Paul is the worst human being to ever grace the silver screen. Yes there are probably characters who have done worse things but never in a film so choking and starkly brutal, and Paul is performed in such a way that he’s completely smug and still fails to even recognise that he’s evil. There’s very few films where I’ll have such a visceral hatred towards a character, in fact I could probably be accused of being too detached when watching a lot of films, but here’s one of the few instances where I was so invested in the potential downfall of this guy that when he half-joked, half-threatened he’d kill himself I was practically yelling at the screen begging him to do it. I guess I should congratulate François Cluzet on bringing to life such a despicable fuck, and Chabrol for creating a pretty great film around him.
How blind, or just dense, does one have to be to reduce this film to a mere topic about “toxic masculinity” or “the possessive man”? Such a reading overlooks the precision with which Chabrol constructs a pathology of perception. The film itself repeatedly directs attention toward mental instability, through the conversations with the doctor, through the mirror, through the peculiar behavior of the camera and through the progressive transformation of insignificant details into objects of suspicion. Jealousy and desire are therefore not sufficient explanations for what we are watching, they are the initial conditions through which Chabrol examines a consciousness becoming incapable of distinguishing between what it sees and what it imagines.Chabrol establishes this mechanism through details that would otherwise have practically no dramatic significance. Such as when Nelly adjusts her skirt, when she naturally helps the guests, the flirtation of the elderly couple, none of these moments requires the significance Paul assigns to them. Their importance lies precisely in their ordinariness. Chabrol allows the image to remain ambiguous while gradually showing how much interpretive violence can be imposed upon it. So any gesture becomes evidence and any coincidence becomes confirmation. (Desire supplies the material, jealousy supplies the logic)For this reason, the marriage itself is almost beside the point. There is little emphasis on divorce or on the practical dissolution of the relationship, what matters is the movement of the ephemeral mind as it progressively reorganizes its surroundings. Paul’s possessiveness develops into a paranoid system, one in which the world acquires meaning according to an increasingly private set of associations. The spectator is made to occupy an unstable position between external reality and subjective interpretation. We know that what appears before us exists, but we cannot assume that the meaning attributed to it is reliable.This is where the film’s final “without end” becomes so exact. “The end” would imply that the problem has been contained within the narrative, that once the sequence of events concludes, its contradictions can be resolved. But here there’s no such resolution. The film has trained the spectator to recognize how little is required for perception to generate an entire system of meanings and that process does not necessarily terminate when the narrative does. What is left is the image itself, stubbornly concrete, alongside the infinite malleability of what can be inferred from it. The disturbance therefore belongs as much to the act of looking as to the man being watched.
