Le Morningafter

The Fire Within. Shirts. Socks. Toothbrush. Razor. Smiling a little, the young man packs his bag and clicks it shut--he is going away, far away. Smiling a little, he picks up a copy of The Great Gatsby, reads the last few pages, lays the book aside, picks up a revolver. Smiling a little, he puts a bullet through his heart.

Suicide in closeup is not something every moviegoer will want to see. But for those susceptible to such morbid fascinations, The Fire will burn with infernal allure. It will also be cheered by connoisseurs of cinema as a redoubt able tour de technique, the most considerable accomplishment of France's Louis Malle (The Lovers). But to many others the film will surely seem more lecture than picture.

As The Fire starts, an alcoholic gigolo (Maurice Ronet) is drying out in a Versailles sanatorium. His doctor says he is cured, but the patient demurs. "All my life," he broods, "I have done nothing but wait. Wait for something to happen, I don't know what. Life moves too slowly in me. I must speed it up. Tomorrow I will kill myself."

Today, however, he decides to go to Paris--apparently to give life one more chance, actually to squander his last sou of hope. One by one he sees his friends again; one by one they are revealed as social Parisites much like himself. In drunken despair he cries: "I cannot love! I cannot touch! And if I do touch I feel nothing!" Le morningafter, he starts packing that bag . . .

As the played-out playboy, Ronet is supremely Malleable. He looks like a Gallic Tony Curtis and pours out the heeltap of his charm like stale champagne. Malle himself must be credited with clever cutting and a well-told tale, but unfortunately he too often vaults from fiction to philosophy, and he has no head for heights. No doubt he is right, if tiresomely unoriginal, when he says that in an anxious age big-city dwellers are too often out of touch with each other and with the fundamental realities of their lives. But the spectator's eyes will probably glaze a little when the death of the gigolo is laboriously identified with the death of the heart in contemporary civilization. And his hackles will surely rise when the whole pretentious mess is blamed on him. In an epilogue addressed to the public the hero peevishly announces: "I leave a stain upon you, an indelible stain." Spinach, perhaps?

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