It's a little hard to vote points for this movie. Malle's "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud" of five years earlier has more drive and Miles Davis to play against the Satie here. But restraint and negation are harder to do, and "Le Feu Follet" succeeds with such perfection, with austerity played against the life of a city. The central character seems real, the moments observed of people in Paris seem real, as is not the case with Marcello and Rome in "La dolce vita" of three years previous, about another crisis of confidence and failed explanations. Malle, admittedly, does allow in a great deal of flamboyant "bourgeois" extravagance, but that's because he confronting and not parroting Drieu la Rochelle. Every shot of Malle's and his cinematographer, Ghislain Croquet, tells something by the way it looks (the camera is saying "he notices," "he's breaking decorum," "that person is self-assured," "she's soignée, and so?", "he's not homosexual," and so on, doing the work of a narrator). And there's the tour de force of a scene at the Café de Flore. "The Fire Within," by the way, is an odd English title for a character who says himself he can't get ignited. "Will of the wisp," "swamp fire" is what flares sporadically as "feu follet."
Review of The Fire Within
