I think it was a happy coincidence that I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked and Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) in succession, on the same day. Both are character-driven movies about men who, on the surface, appear to live in the same world as us. Sure, they’re troubled—but only temporarily so.
Of course, it turns out that this isn’t the case. Johnny (from Naked) and Alain (from Le Feu Follet are in various states of Sartrean nausea. They’ve lost existential traction but no one seems them slipping, at least not in the way they really are. The inner context is a secret we all possess, but they so more than others, more than the rest of us. They are outsiders—it could not be otherwise.
Maurice is about to commit suicide. No one sees it coming. Everyone thinks there is hope for him. Everyone thinks that he’s been down, but he’s a plucky and resilient type of guy. From what we can surmise from the film about his past—he was a socialite, maybe a playboy, and most certainly the life of the party. He used to have it so together. And yet, something happened to him. It seems to be something more than issues with his estranged American wife. Surely, a failed relationship is no reason to commit suicide, right? His suicide doesn’t come at the end of some vicious mood—it’s premeditated, methodical.
Johnny is a bit different—we first get acquainted with him as he’s raping a woman. He’s not instantly likable, and it would hardly beggar the imagination call him an emotional parasite. He seems to play with people, goading them, leading them on, a demonic actor-director of dramas in his mind that we (and the other characters) cannot even begin to fathom. There’s something inherently vengeful and misogynistic about how he treats the women in the film, even including the ones he supposedly cares for.
His emotional vampire act left me bewildered. How can someone sustain themselves like, that for long. My answer is that most people cannot, and that’s why Johnny is at the end of his tether. The real source of his angst is not Y2k, and it’s not his exile from Manchester, and it’s even more not the feelings that stirred by being around old flame Louise. The source of his angst is his aloneness and outsider status.
There are tender moments in both films, where old friendships seem, at least for awhile, to offer the possibility of redemption. But in the end, neither Alain or Johnny can dally too long. In the case of Alain, I was never under much illusion that he would change his mind, it seemed a foregone conclusion that he would die on the 23rd of July, and the only question left was how. On the other hand, when Johnny and Louise are having that conversation in the bathroom, and she decided to go back to Manchester that very day, you wonder or not if this is the happy ending that we had all hoped for. Actress Leslie Sharpe, who plays Louise, is resplendent in this deceptively simple scene—the shots of her face as she talks with Johnny and they find out that they still have feelings for each other and might go back to Manchester together. That scene left a deep impression on me, if only because it the ONE bright light in the bleak landscape of the film. I had seen the film before but had forgotten how it ended, so the scene and the end of the film still hit me as if I’d been watching it for the first time. So when you see Johnny taking the money and limping away, the sun behind him, it’s a bit devastating. It’s as if he knew that he couldn’t really make good on his promise to Louise. It’s as if he knew that getting close to another human being—opening to them to the point that you might become an integral part of their happiness—was just something he couldn’t hack. And so he drifts, yet again. The selfish impulses of the man are nothing if not consistent.
Alain, never seems to waver. You begin to admire the man for being so methodical. He ends a visit to his old friend by lambasting the fellow for choosing the path of mediocrity. The says in reply that although outwardly he might seem mediocre, with his nice apartment and kid and bourgeois lifestyle, but that his passion is still there. It’s that he lives without passion, but that his passion has been transferred to these extremely mundane things. Throughout the film you don’t get the sense that Alain is killing himself out of artistic principle—that is, there is no great ideology behind his suicide, it’s just an intractable sadness that transforms him, a huge glitch in the neurons that throws everything off. Yet in this scene, with his friend, you really hear him speak out, about the choices that people make, the ramifications of those choices, for him, for the friends who made those choices, for their lives, for their friendship. It’s one of the more rare “outbursts” that Alain has during the film.
I’m not sure where to end this. These are both excellent films that etch themselves in my mind in a way that ensemble pieces or movies with dense plots lines cannot—I suppose that there is just something inherently more captivating about movies that deal with the inner depths of the individual.
