INFERNO (L'ENFER)/AUSTIN FILM SOCIETY

Tonight's film in the Directors Without Boarders series is a doc about a French film.  And why it did not get made.  After hearing Chale's opening comments I knew that we were going to see a film about a filmmaker that Chale loves (his notes he handed out are  5 1/2 pages!)  The doc shows the unbridled and unfocused and unstructured Clouzot driving his actors and crew crazy by his working methods.  The screenplay  is of an obsessive paranoid husband imagining his wife (played by the beautiful Romy Schneider) being unfaithful with men and women alike.  We see the actors working their hardest to meet Clouzot's infinite demands and crew is awakened at 2 a.m. repeatedly to work on Clouzot's latest ideas.  The jealousy scenes with the husband are palpable.  The experimentation with lighting, color, patterns are maddening.  In the end I felt this was a sad commentary about a difficult artist losing a disciplined center needed to create his film.