No Exit (1954) User Reviews

Before Agnès Varda,there was Jacqueline Audry.

[dbdumonteil · 8/10 · 13 October 2002]

...Probably the first important woman director France has ever known.Male chauvinism:her movies are very rarely broadcast on TV and her name is slowly fading.

She often adapted Colette's works for the screen,but here,she tackles Jean-Paul Sartre ,no less!It's the philosopher's most famous drama (with its immortal sentence :"l'enfer,c'est les autres" (= Hell is

other people).Audry had to cope with problems inherent to any adaptation of a play:she succeeded quite good by using flashbacks - like Mankiewicz would do for "suddenly last summer"-,and inventing a very brilliant first scene:Alan Parker might have seen the movie,because he uses the elevator in "Angel heart" (1987)the same way Audry did in 1954.

Most of all,she's got three convincing actors,two of whom are unfortunately forgotten today (Gaby Sylvia was essentially a stage actress and Frank Villard was cast against type here:he was the tough male raider type:but convincing anyway).The third one is none other than the great Arletty:after "les enfants du paradis",like so many others who "collaborated" during the occupation -her only sin was to fall in love with a German:she said afterwards "My heart is French,but my a.. is international!"-she was blacklisted and when she could return,she was relegated to small parts -but she triumphed on the stage notably with the part of Blanche in "streetcar named desire"-."Huis clos" is one of her rare leading parts after the war.She outdoes herself here ,playing lesbian Inès so intensely she's almost frightening and threatening.As historian Jean Tulard said "she was our best actress"

"Huis clos" is really interesting and will reward you if you give it a chance.Three people (alive or dead no matter)tearing each others to pieces.

If you like it,try "les jeux sont faits" another Sartre adaptation by Jean Delannoy

It's Not Where You Sartre ...

[writers_reign · 7/10 · 7 January 2013]

The main attraction here is the great Arletty. Yes, it's Satre's best known work by a country mile but it's also a war-horse getting long in the tooth by virtue of the fact that Jean-Paul made it irresistible for Am-Drams everywhere by setting it in one room with minimal furniture so it's been done to death, you should forgive the pun. Jacqueline Audry starts with a nod to Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait by having a group of people (clearly sinners although, of course, they look just like you and me) stepping into an elevator that, once full, goes downwards rapidly with almost subliminal glimpses of flames outside. Eventually they embark in the foyer of a luxury hotel which has the sign 'Reception' written in English. Ines (Arletty) is already there and appears to be part of the staff, whilst Garcin (Frank Villard) is shown to the living room of what would be a suite were there any other doors. Eventually he is joined by Estelle (Gaby Sylvia) and Ines and within minutes it occurs to them that they are in fact dead and doomed to spend eternity tormenting each other. As it happens all three are excellent but Arletty was someone the camera loved and even cast against type as a lesbian and butch with it she grabs the attention and doesn't let go. Audry is reasonably inventive utilising a window in the room as a movie screen from which the protagonists can see where they went wrong. You could, of course, argue that Sartre wrote a one-act play in which three disparate people were confined in a small space indefinitely and couldn't help driving each other mad. You could also argue that what works in the theatre - and especially in a small, intimate theatre - doesn't work on screen so I'm happy to give Audry - arguably the first female director in France to tackle 'issues', a sort of female Cayatte - brownie points for an honest attempt to add colour to what is essentially a Shavian play. I'm also delighted to see Arletty given an all-too rare leading role and wallow in her performance.

L'enfer, c'est les autres!

[brogmiller · 8/10 · 1 November 2019]

Directed by the very talented but alas forgotten Jacqueline Audry this is a first class adaptation by her husband Pierre Laroche of Jean-Paul Sartre's play concerning three people who are doomed to spend eternity tearing each other to pieces to atone for their earthly sins. The excellent production design is by Maurice Colasson. The success or failure of this piece will always depend of course on the quality of the cast and the three leading actors do not disappoint.Frank Villard who had twice before worked with Audry is mucho macho as Joseph without being one-dimensional and the wonderfully photogenic Gaby Sylvia as Estelle proves that she is more than just a pretty face. However the film really belongs to Arletty whose fortunes waned after the war for reasons which are well documented and who gives a truly frightening portrayal as Ines. This is her best postwar film role and she plays it with relish. This powerful, menacing and claustrophobic piece serves to remind one of the tremendous influence exerted by Sartre over other dramatists, not least Harold Pinter.

Solid film adaptation of a great play that's difficult to adapt

[bypeterfenton · 6/10 · 8 February 2022]

As an existing (and avid) fan of the stage play, I was curious to see how Jean-Paul Sartre's classic dark existentialist comedy would translate to film. Knowing that Mass and Twelve Angry Men are both films I adore that take place essentially in one room, I know that it's possible to achieve such a feat and make it something really special. I admire the directorial decision to have the screen in the room display cinematic representations of the worlds of each character moving on without them, and I think the principal roles of Garcin, Ines, and Estelle were especially well-cast. The cinematography was a touch dry (though feels period-accurate of the mid-50s), but the acting was believable enough and the set design was spot-on. I think, while I understand the intent to create a world existing outside the room to make the work of theatre more cinematic, the opening 10-15 minutes or so felt very slow and superfluous, it didn't add much at all to the existing drama/comedy that comes from the characters interacting.

I do have to wonder if I would've given this a higher score if I had seen the film with English subtitles-the copy I watched was in the film's original French and with German subtitles I couldn't remove.

"I've always been in rooms I don't like, in false situations."

[morrison-dylan-fan · 10/10 · 31 March 2021]

Finding Olivia (1951-also reviewed) to be absolutely spellbinding,I started searching for the next title from auteur film maker Jacqueline Audry to have English subtitles. Intrigued by this sounding rather different to her other works,I began looking for the exit.

View on the film:

Departing from the Costume Drama setting the majority of her credits take place in, directing auteur Jacqueline Audry & Forbidden Games (1952-also reviewed) cinematographer Robert Juillard welcome everyone into hell with magnificent ultra-stylisation,via mesmerising in-camera tricks which places the visions of what the three people have left behind into the room,with Audry winding panning shots from the afterlife back down to Earth.

Packing them all in one room, Audry continues to expand her eye for elegant detail,with the walls of the room glistening with refined elegance,that Audry cuts through with a knife in starling close-ups on this new hellish life getting under Garcin's skin.

All locked in, the ensemble cast give magnificent performances,with the dressed in a masculine suit, (which would become a recurring motif of Audry's works, continued in Le secret du Chevalier d'Eon (1959-also reviewed)) rather butch lesbian turn Arletty gives gloriously going against the tide of her feminine image.

Reuniting with Audry after Gigi (1949-also reviewed), Frank Villard gives a scotching hot turn as Garcin, who Villard places under boiling hot pressure from finding himself in Hell,which Villard snaps in brittle exchanges with Estelle (played with a sharp, enticing curiosity by Gaby Sylvia.)

Taking on Jean-Paul Sartre's classic play, the screenplay by Audry's husband/ regular collaborator Pierre Laroche superbly adapts the one location origins into a cinematic nightmare gallery, via gripping, Film Noir flashbacks unveiling the vicious misdeeds of the three strangers, and the ripe cynical aftermath they have left behind, as Laroche ushers into a hotel with no exit.

One may feel mildly diverted rather than existentially drained

[philosopherjack · 14 May 2021]

Jacqueline Audry's filming of Sartre's Huis-clos is an emblematic example of "opening out" a piece of theatre, taking a four-character, one-room play, and visually depicting much of what was merely discussed in the original text, expanding the reach of the material in ways that are explicitly cinematic. The film's opening sequence evokes Powell and Pressburger, as the newly departed arrive by elevator in a hotel lobby which marks the entrance to hell, then soon narrows down to the setting of Sartre's original, a single room in which three unrelated adults, two women and a man, are set down, initially somewhat diverted by images from the lives they left behind, which eventually run out once they're effectively forgotten by the world, leaving them only with each other, for all of eternity, with the facts of their stained lives (marked among other things by cowardice, murder and predatory desire) out in the open, and with the classic realization that "hell is other people." The film within a film devices are mostly effective, but inevitably serve to rather dilute the existential horror of the central situation: it depicts the three staking out the games they'll likely play for all eternity, alliances and enmities spontaneously forming and as rapidly dissolving, the ugliness and neediness that condemned them on earth emerging and retreating, but the film rather races through it all (it only lasts a little more than an hour and a half) so that one feels at the end mildly diverted rather than existentially drained (the contemporary impact may be diluted also by so many meta-movie concepts subsequently cycled through by Hollywood). But the film is entirely worth seeing on many levels, including its presentation of same-sex desire and relationships (providing a natural bridge to Audry's best-known film, Olivia), and a final shot equal to the evocation of a sealed-off eternity.

An underrated masterpiece

[udippel · 8/10 · 25 April 2022]

Not only because of Arletty, the famous.

Not only because of Jacqueline Audry, almost forgotten these days.

But also because of Yves Deniaud, who passed away too early, and seemingly overlooked. Somehow he managed to keep the plot running, the other three in sync. To me he has the traits of a comedian in this movie, an early Coluche.

I found this movie a more pleasant one than the famous stage interpretation by Harold Pinter, probably due to the actual hotel scenes in the beginning. "Hotel California" springs into mind: you can check in anytime, but you can never check out.