Henri-Georges Clouzot : ... marital trouble.

Clouzot’s work later ran into milder trouble. He was married, a common situation for a man. His wife was an actress, nothing out of the ordinary for a director, though she probably became one only when she married him.

Vera Clouzot was born Amado and Brazilian, but no born actress. She was able to make Orane Demazis, Pagnol’s long time life companion, look good.

« Le salaire de la peur » (1953) starts as the perfect movie pitch : four adventurers drive two truckloads of nitroglycerine over awful tracks through Central America to an oil field in order to stop a raging fire.

Today, the film looks as dated as « Le corbeau » is timeless : contrived stereotypes, tired tales of virile friendship, laughable tough guy dialogues, and a severe case of bad acting by Charles Vanel, whose survival skills -he died at ninety seven and nearly worked to the end- later made a French cinema icon ; a few more decades and he would have been a great, deaf, blind and mute actor.

The movie universe was purely male, but the Latin American location gave Clouzot the excuse he needed for a supporting part tailored to his wife : Brazil was in Latin America ; though her native language was Portuguese rather than Spanish, her accent would sound genuine enough to French ears ; despite her best efforts, she could not do much worse than Charles Vanel. This was sound reasoning and her role went mostly unnoticed.

In « Les diaboliques » (1954), Vera Clouzot starred next to Paul Meurisse and Simone Signoret. She was resolutely bad ; whether her presence hurt or benefited the film is nevertheless open to discussion.

The movie looks like a French ancestor to « Basic instinct » : it is no coincidence that « Diabolique » (1996), the US adaptation of the same Boileau-Narcejac novel -the duo of French writers also behind Hitchcock’s « Vertigo »-, starred Sharon Stone.

The film script is silly at best, while the love triangle of Paul Meurisse -husband-, Vera Clouzot -wife- and Simone Signoret -Meurisse’s mistress- makes very little psychological sense : you can understand that the two women want to get rid of him, never why they would marry him or become his lover.

Their triangle is nevertheless visually arresting : Paul Meurisse’s ghost-like, enigmatic Eurasian face and from beyond the grave voice, Simone Signoret’s deceiving air of physical and mental good health. As to Vera Clouzot, she acts so bad as to look plainly insane.

The overall effect is outright creepy, particularly as Clouzot directs the whole film down the same path and gives up on narration and rationality to focus on visual trickery.

The picture consequently veers from the thriller genre towards a horror movie of the « Scream » kind : too ridiculous and kitsch to be taken seriously, still able to shock and scare you against your better judgement.

One year after « Les diaboliques », Clouzot found a most elegant solution to his wife’s longing for acting : he turned to documentary filmmaking.

« Le mystère Picasso » (1955) may be the director’s best thriller film : thanks to the use of a particular type of ink, Picasso’s drawings appear directly on screen as the artist creates them.

The result is a breath-taking display of sudden plot twists, astonishing U-turns, unannounced direction switches, unpredictable endings, as Picasso abruptly changes his mind or heart, shifts his mood, erases a figure or the whole drawing, starts back from scratch or decides his work is complete and moves on to the next one.

Clouzot captures a process rarely or ever seen before on screen : art in the making. With a likely mix of awe and frustration, the director witnesses the painter’s creative freedoms, all that himself will never be allowed to do, or only at the script stage, before his vision is committed to celluloid : throw away a nearly finished work and start it all over again.

With barely veiled contempt for the filmmaker, many critics describe « Le mystère Picasso » as the work of a talented director about a genius.

Their contempt may be as short-sighted as their perspective on the film : fiction and Picasso have no monopoly on plot twists, many-layered tales and drawings ; documentary films too may achieve complexity and ambiguity and their screening accommodate various readings.

Watching Picasso at work is no doubt fascinating, but the film, by its very existence, also shows the artist’s close attention to maybe his most ambitious creation : his personal myth.

The movie silently exposes the painter‘s narcissism as, through the camera lens, Picasso actually watches himself in the act of painting. In the end, what do we see on screen ? Picasso painting ? or Picasso playing the part of Picasso painting ?

Does he not consciously overact -or rather « overpaint »- to show off and exaggerate his improvisation skills and the richness of his inspiration, and force upon the passive camera his ideal view of himself as a versatile God ?

Vera Clouzot died in 1960, of a heart attack, like in « Les diaboliques ». In the film, her character’s death resulted from Machiavellian -if unbelievable- plotting by husband Paul Meurisse.

In real life, Clouzot was not suspected. Maybe the director managed the perfect murder and killed his wife with the news that he would direct Brigitte Bardot in « La verité » (1960) and she would have no part in the movie. « La vérité » -the truth- is sometimes so hard and cruel that it breaks hearts.

At the time of her death, Vera Clouzot’s acting career amounted to three films, all by her husband.