Nicknamed the "French Hitchcock," Henri-Georges Clouzot was responsible for two of France's best post-war pictures, The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques. Yet, not long after his intriguing documentary The Mystery of Picasso, his relevance hit a sharp decline -- even as Hitchcock himself, and the suspense genre in general, became more and more popular.

But now we are suddenly confronted with evidence of what might have been Clouzot's magnum opus in Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's mesmerizing new documentary hybrid, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno. Sparked by an unexpected meeting between Bromberg and Clouzot's widow in a stalled elevator, the film goes about the task of filling in the gaps between, surrounding, and caused by the 15 hours of footage (mostly rushes and screen tests) that are left of L'Enfer, Clouzot's immensely ambitious and unfinished 1964 production of a psychological-thriller-cum-acid-trip.

Fascinated by Fellini's 8 ½, according to assistant director Costa-Gavras, Clouzot meant to blow out a relatively simple tale of an innkeeper (Serge Reggiani) and his obsessive jealousy over his young wife, Odette (Romy Schneider), with all matter of hallucinatory audio and visual effects. Much of the footage that Bromberg, a film archivist, and Medrea, a lawyer, plumb involves cherry bomb Schneider modeling outfits, smoking and testing reactions under pulsing colored lights, covered in glitter and fluorescent make-up. Enthralled by modern art, Clouzot subjected his imagery to rhythmic zooms, fetishized close-ups, and cascades of visual effects, one of which literally involves a cascade of water rippling over images of Schneider and Reggiani.

What the hell was he up to? Clouzot certainly had a vision of where he wanted L'Enfer to end up and, given an "unlimited budget" by Columbia Pictures, did not want for lack of fiscal security. Rather than studio interference, it was Clouzot's own (denied) pathology that plagued the production. A notorious insomniac, Clouzot would hound his crew at all hours of the night, ran his cast ragged and demanded reshoots at nearly every turn. Following Reggiani's abrupt exit from the film -- the role was briefly recast with Jean-Louis Trintignant -- Clouzot suffered a near-fatal heart attack while shooting an encounter between Schneider and co-star Dany Carrel on a boat, effectively aborting the project.

Indeed, Bromberg and Medrea do a far more chilling and terrifically fascinating job by arranging the remnants of Clouzot's smashed centerpiece, rather than tangling with the beast on a purely narrative level. While adding a soundtrack to several scenes and uncovering Clouzot's own experimental sound tests, the directors also rebuild key scenes via readings, recasting Jacques Gamblin in Reggiani's role and Bérénice Bejo in Schneider's. What sounds like a mess eventually emerges as a daring, fractious dual portrait of pathology run amok and the frustration inherent in attempting to perfectly realize any imagined narrative, whether it be a film or a future with another.  
                
It would be foolish (my kind of foolish) to imagine that Inferno will remind the wider public of Clouzot's admittedly extreme but astonishingly effective talents. More pointedly, Bromberg and Medrea have presented the doomed project as an entity refracted and rearranged through countless perspectives and dismantled parts, getting to the dark heart of the artist's obsession, over 30 years after his death. Compared to Claude Chabrol's tedious 1994 version of L'Enfer, Inferno suggests that certain projects are simply more captivating in their incompleteness.  

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