Jacqueline Audry’s filming of Sartre’s Huis-clos is
an emblematic example of “opening out” a piece of theatre, taking a
four-character, one-room play, and visually depicting much of what was merely
discussed in the original text, expanding the reach of the material in ways
that are explicitly cinematic. The film’s opening sequence evokes Powell and
Pressburger, as the newly departed arrive by elevator in a hotel lobby which
marks the entrance to hell, then soon narrows down to the setting of Sartre’s original,
a single room in which three unrelated adults, two women and a man, are set
down, initially somewhat diverted by images from the lives they left behind,
which eventually run out once they’re effectively forgotten by the world, leaving them only
with each other, for all of eternity, with the facts of their stained lives
(marked among other things by cowardice, murder and predatory desire) out in
the open, and with the classic realization that “hell is other people.” The film
within a film devices are mostly effective, but inevitably serve to rather dilute
the existential horror of the central situation: it depicts the three staking
out the games they’ll likely play for all eternity, alliances and enmities
spontaneously forming and as rapidly dissolving, the ugliness and neediness that
condemned them on earth emerging and retreating, but the film rather races
through it all (it only lasts a little more than an hour and a half) so that one
feels at the end mildly diverted rather than existentially drained (the
contemporary impact may be diluted also by so many meta-movie concepts subsequently
cycled through by Hollywood). But the film is entirely worth seeing on many
levels, including its presentation of same-sex desire and relationships (providing
a natural bridge to Audry’s best-known film, Olivia), and a final shot
equal to the evocation of a sealed-off eternity.
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