The Fire Within

An alcoholic contemplates suicide in Louis Malle’s devastating 1963 film about the human desire for meaning. Louis Malle was a director of astonishing range. He did so many different kinds of films that critics have tended to underappreciate him, because they can’t put him in a neat little category. My favorite of his films is one of his earliest—the 1963 poetic drama The Fire Within. The story concerns Alain, an alcoholic in his mid-20s played by Maurice Ronet, who has just dried out at a clinic in Versailles. His American wife has left him, and when the film opens he…