You won't be disappointed!

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The owner of the Hotel Du Lac, Paul Prieur (François Cluzet), gets married with the beautiful and sexy Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) and they have a boy. Nelly loves Paul and is pleasant with guests, and the insecure Paul feels that she is a woman out of his league.When Nelly spends some time with the handsome guest Martineau (Marc Lavoine), Paul follows her and becomes paranoid and delusional believing that she is unfaithful to him. His increasing obsession turns into madness that ends in an announced tragedy."L'Enfer" is a dramatic tale of insecurity, paranoia and madness by Claude Chabrol, with the story of a man that lives in hell with his jealousy and brings this hell to the life of his wife. Last time that I had seen this film was on 23 April 2000 and the story is timeless and has not aged. The tragic conclusion is predictable and my only remark is the attitude of Doctor Arnoux, who should have foreseen that the safety of Nelly was in danger with the insane Paul. Emmanuelle Béart is wonderfully cast to justify the obsession of Paul. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "Ciúme - O Inferno do Amor Possessivo" ("Jealousy - The Hell of the Possessive Love")Note: On 04 February 2018, I saw this film again.

Why would a woman stay with a man who is trying to kill her? Why would she even spend the night with a crazy man, when the hospital is coming to take him to the loony bin the next morning? There's too much deaux ex machina stuff going on here.But the writers did foresee this objection: they made her kinda simple, a hip-swinging flirt, oblivious to the effect she has on other men and her increasingly more jealous husband. She even keeps it up when she finds out about his jealous, but in her stupidity, she thinks it means he truly loves her.There has been another French movie on this same subject, with the husband becoming increasingly more jealous. As much as I love these Frenchies, with their afternoon delights, I find it weird that the French MEN would make 2 great movies about a French MAN becoming jealous. If it's so well accepted, why this? Maybe there's a lot of suppression going on.And here's another point well made: financial problems can drive you crazy. He was not having a lot of business, and his insanity causes him to drive even more away as he rages in full hearing of his guests....and later, full sight. Too bad we're not allowed any insight into the origins of his craziness. Those voices don't just come in out of the blue.The woman, Emmanuelle, was truly beautiful and would have had to have been in order to carry this movie off. His insanity did have some realistic triggers: men DID covet her, and she sure didn't try to hide her charms. Reminded me of Raquel Welch wearing her skin tight red t-shirt in "Mother, Jugs and Speed", then upbraiding the drivers for calling her 'Jugs'. A wee bit inconsistent, hypocritical of the characters in both movies.The male actor was superior in showing all the nuances of jealousy on his face, running desperately to parallel his wife's water-skiing escapade on the back of the Lothario's boat and finding her getting back on the boat after putting on her shoes. If I know my husband is jealous, I"m not going to further inflame him by going off with a guy like this. Again, she was kinda dumb and childish but that could have been made a bit more obvious.Like the ending. No one knows what really happened. Time for a sequel. This movie was just shown at the MFA in Boston. It calls for a re-run, but having been jealous myself, it's rather painful to watch.

Chabrol will always be Chabrol - sometimes less, rarely if ever more (maybe in La Femme Infidele...). But he's Chabrol, God bless him: love, lakes, bourgeoisie, jealousy, sex, meals, bonhomie, kids who appear and disappear, murderous thoughts, weird surrealism right before the end. You can set your watch by him. Emmanuel Beart is unbelievably sexy. And the film is a perfect illustration of some (dimly understood by me) Lacanian theories: sexual intercourse's dream of fusion is impossible, for example. Having possessed the ideal object, Cluzet knows that, in fact, one possesses nothing. Everything that makes Beart alluring also makes her dangerous in that she freely chooses...whatever she freely chooses. Freely choosing fidelity means that any moment you can freely choose infidelity. So a guy just can't win. That's why DeCordova in Bunuel's El (adroitly cited by another one of the readers here) pulls out the needle and thread. This film has none of the humor and acuity of Bunuel's neglected masterpiece. But it's Chabrol, and he's doing his thing. That ain't nothing...As a study of a man's descent from jealousy into madness, however, the film is powerful and well made but not super subtle.

Among all the directors labelled "nouvelle vague",Claude Chabrol was arguably the one who had more affinities with the precedent generation so despised by a lot of his sixties colleagues.And the generation before Chabrol included the genius Henri-George Clouzot.So,to film "les diaboliques"'s director lost screenplay,Chabrol was ideal.Both he and Clouzot mix detective stories,social satire and psychological studies. "L'enfer" might be one of Chabrol's finest achievements.François Cluzet,in a lifetime performance,portrays a jealous man-recalling Bunuel's hero in "El'(1952)-,but his jealousy verges on madness.Little by little,with small touches,we see this maleficent obsession grow like a cancer,destroying everything,his wife's sincere love(well played by Emmanuelle Béart),his personality,his job.And see how Chabrol masters space.At the beginning,the action takes place in a wonderful lake setting.Then we do not get out of the hotel owned by Cluzet,with its dangerous corridors .And in the final sequences ,the director confines his two characters to a doctor office or their bedroom. Cluzet's madness and its inexorable progression are masterfully shown too.First,only some gestures,some voice inflexions.Then he begins to follow her everywhere .Then come the hallucinations:the amateur movie projected onto a small screen in the restaurant is the film's apex and should be part of a Chabrol anthology.Interior voices obsess the unfortunate hero,and every time he looks himself in a mirror,he sees an irrational world,this world he lives in,this world he believes in.No longer able to communicate with the normal one,he forces the other ones (his wife being first in line)to enter his.And we are not sure,at the end of the movie,that Béart is not on the other side of the mirror too.Two private jokes: In the first sequence,Béart puts her hair in braids,and she resembles Vera Clouzot in "les diaboliques".When the young couple comes back to the restaurant after the wedding,the little accordion tune "les couleurs du temps" that you hear was written by Guy Béart,Emmanuelle's father a long time ago.NB.Clouzot's version,which he began to film circa 1963,featured Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani.(although the film was never completed,it has a page on IMDb)