Hubert Deschamps

Monique is in the late stages of terminal illness. Her philandering, alcoholic husband Roger, her son Philippe, unfaithful like his father, and her daughter-in-law Nathalie (screen icon Nathalie Baye, in one of her earliest roles) gather around her. We observe them playing with life as she dies.

After garnering international acclaim for such seminal crowd-pleasers as THE LOVERS and ZAZIE DANS LE MÉTRO, Louis Malle gave his fans a shock with THE FIRE WITHIN (LE FEU FOLLET), a penetrating study of individual and social inertia. Maurice Ronet (ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS), in an implosive, haunted performance, plays Alain Leroy, a self-destructive writer who resolves to kill himself and spends the next twenty-four hours trying to reconnect with a host of wayward friends. Unsparing in its portrait of Alain’s inner turmoil and shot with remarkable clarity, THE FIRE WITHIN is one of Malle’s darkest and most personal films.