Jacqueline Audry | Huis-clos (No Exit) / 1954

talking eternally about what cannot be changed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pierre Laroche and Jean-Paul Sartre (screenplay), Jacqueline Audry (director) Huis-clos (No Exit) / 1954

 

Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous play opened in Paris in 1944, and was brought to New York and directed by John Houston on the Broadway stage in a performance that lasted only 31 performances. There are good reasons for this, as I suggest throughout this essay.

    The original title actually translates as “Behind Closed Doors,” which belies one of the problems of this play concerning Sartre’s philosophical arguments about existentialism, an argument that basically posits that since there is no creator, human beings are essentially “condemned to be free.” “Their being is not determined, so it is up to everyone to create their own existence, for which each of us are then responsible.”

     One of the major problems with Huis Clos is that it metaphorically creates an experience close to either the Christian Hell or Limbo, thus almost locking itself into a religious world of predestination by association, a world wherein essence matters more than existence. The gatekeepers know everything about those condemned to spend their lives here, and the individuals, locked together in a single room, are not at all free to change their destinies.

     But, of course, what Sartre is attempting to create is a world after “death,” after these individuals have defined or determined their own lives. The Hell he is speaking of is not a metaphysical world of brimstone and torture, but a world of other people, who judge and detest each other for their own actions. And this particular trio, consisting of the lesbian Inès Serrano, the journalist Joseph Garcin, and the beautiful but unfaithful wife of an older man, Estelle Rigault, have all done such terrible things in their lives that they can only be judged by others as morally reprehensible and even dangerous.

     Yet, even here there are problems in Sartre’s moral values: although Inès is also selfish, cruel, and manipulative, her major crime against society is apparently her sexual orientation and her seduction of the young married woman Florence. It is primarily for being a lesbian seducer that she is damned. And one senses that her character, the dominant one in the play I would argue, is highly problematic to its author since he loved and took as a companion as early as the 1929 Simone de Beauvoir, a bisexual, who also had lesbian sex within her 51-year relationship with Sartre.

     Later, moreover, she and Sartre were both accused of sexual exploitation, in particular for de Beauvoir grooming one her students, Bianca Lamblin, for her own sexual advances and later passing the girl on to Sartre. In 1939, moreover, she was accused of seducing a 17-year-old lycée pupil Natalie Sorokine, the young girl’s parents charging de Beauvoir with debauching a minor (the age of consent at the time as 13). Beauvoir temporarily lost her license to teach in France.

    In short, Inès almost incorporates the crimes of both Sartre and his lover de Beauvoir, which certainly creates a strange tension in the play—although mostly unrecognized at the time of the play’s production—the writer and his lover being just as guilty as the figure they put before the ultimate judges, the audience of the play.

    The attitudes about homosexuality were very different in their day, and now I should think that any reasoned being would certainly not find Inès morally guilty for her sexuality, and would certainly question whether having lured Florence to her bed, a woman well of decision-making age, was a moral failure. In fact, it is Florence who has killed Inès, turning on the gas which she presumed would have killed her as well. And it is Florence who draws her not so intelligent husband back into her arms, asking for and receiving his forgiveness, presumably so that she might survive.

      If nothing else, moreover, Inès Serrano openly admits her “crimes,” and unlike the other attempts to hide nothing. She almost accepts her fate with gusto.

      Joseph Garcin has surely betrayed his underground movement buddies, working against the fascist government, in his attempt to escape, abandoning their cause. He fails and is shot.

     And apparently he has betrayed his dear friend, Diego, whom Sartre hints might have been far more than just his “best friend,” repeatedly describing their love for one another.

     Garcin has also betrayed his marriage vow by openly taking their black servant as his mistress.    

     One, however, has to question to what degree self-preservation and infidelity stand as major moral issues. Garcin’s wife also appears to be a monster herself in keeping the former black servant with her simply so that she can represent her as someone and something over which she has control, imagining that by doing so she has retained her husband. And Garcin perhaps all too clearly sees his and his friend’s underground group as a lost cause. If nothing else, he is not guilty of treason, of betraying their existence to the police, even though they vote him to be expunged from their records as a traitor.

     That he has abandoned his friends, his wife, and his lover is quite explicitly obvious. Yet it appears that all save Diego equally abandoned their good memories, admiration, and love of him even before he faced the firing squad.

 

     Estelle Rigault is the most clearly morally corrupt of the group, at least to my way of thinking. She has married an older man for his money, had an affair with a younger friend out of vanity, and drowned their child in a frozen river, making her a murderer, the crime in turn causing her lover to kill himself. She is a narcissist willing to ignore Garcin’s “crimes” if only he will admire and make love to her. But then Inès is equally willing to take on this murderer as her would-be lover in the Hell of after-life.

      And in Estelle’s defense—if there is any to be imagined—as a woman who lived primarily by her beauty and charms she was imprisoned in a marriage with an older man and forced to have a

child in a time when, much again like our own, abortion was illegal. Certainly, her marriage would not have lasted if she returned home with a child, and the young man who fathered it apparently did not have the finances to assure either her or the child’s survival. Estelle was a woman who, in part, despite Sartre’s arguments of the freedom to determine the self, was defined and determined by a patriarchal society.

     As Sartre would surely argue, however, justifications are meaningless. It is the inner truth that matters, if a being is able to come to terms with it.

     But it is not simply the fact that Sartre seemed perfectly willing to follow the religious and conservative social values about sexuality and marriage in assessing these figures’ moral worth, but that he embedded his ideas—and this is an ideological drama—in what remains to this day a very old-fashioned play, its tales told mostly through personal monologues, without any possibility of theatrical action. One might argue that, like its characters, Sartre’s play was dead on arrival. Even Beckett’s famed Waiting for Godot has far more significant action, based as it is on the potentiality of arrival.

     Had it even been a work of genius, which some are convinced it still is, a Hollywood film adaptation would have been quite impossible given the stipulations of the Production Code wherein a lesbian character would have been required to be cut from the script.

    The French adaptation, helmed by the major woman director in France of the time, Jacqueline Audry, might have seemed the perfect facilitator. She had already directed two major films by and about lesbian figures, Gigi (1949) and the brilliant lesbian school-girl drama Olivia (1951), the latter one of my favorite films of the period.

    In their search to open up the drama to the cinema camera, Audry’s husband as the screenwriter added a long narrative introduction as several figures descend into Hell via an elevator and check in at the lobby front desk. He, presumably with Sartre’s approval, also extended the role of the valet (played by the comic actor Yves Deniaud), and added something akin to TV movie screens to portray the scenes from the past life and what the major trio’s friends say of them after their deaths.

     Perhaps the best assessment of these extensions of the film is expressed by Phil Hall in his “No Exit” essay presented in Bootleg Files published on line:

 

“Much of the problem involves a new opening sequence that plays like a boulevard comedy instead of an Existential drama. An elevator brings a collection of diverse characters in a downward journey, with the elevator opening to the lobby of an ornate hotel. The new “guests” include a self-important bemedaled military office, a dizzy dowager, a Chinese coolie, a priest, a vagabond, and a young woman who collapses in hysteria when the elevator reaches its lower-level destination. Each guest is treated with mild condescension by a front desk clerk who processes their arrival with varying degrees of irritation – he is not impressed with the men’s professional standing or the dowager’s bribery attempt.

     Nearly 10 minutes pass before the film gets to the heart of the Sartre play. The valet is played by Yves Deniaud, a comic actor and singer who plays the role in a sad-faced deadpan manner that gives the character a more sincere vibe than the supercilious personality given to the valet in Sartre’s original vision.    

    The actors three main characters are closer to the play’s vision – Frank Villard intelligently captures the self-loathing destructiveness of the malevolent Garcin, Gaby Silvia is perfect as the vain and none-too-bright Estelle, and the great Arletty – who became an international star in Marcel Carne’s 1945 Children of Paradise – is most effective as the predatory Inez. But while the actors shine in their roles, the film version unwisely robs them of the dramatic power of their respective soliloquy’s where they can view and describe the world they left behind. In this production, those glimpses into the land of the living are visualized by having them look out a window that turns into something of a television screen broadcasting what they are describing. This device also erases a key element of Sartre’s Hell – the room where the trio are imprisoned is supposed to be windowless, in order to reinforce their eternal isolation.”

 

  Although Arletty is surely the stand-out in this film version, and was a brilliant choice for Audry and others to have made, the actor herself was highly controversial to French audiences since she fell into immediate disgrace after World War II for having had a romantic affair with a German Nazi officer, certainly for some, a moral failure more severe than Inès’ sexuality.

     What I see as the central dangers in the various procedures to make Sartre’s play more dramatic is that they resort even further to a religious notion that the characters have entered into some Dantean Hell wherein the “landlord” (hinted at being in control) has already defined and classified their lives; their torture is simply the self-knowledge of the recognition of their criminal acts by the two others in the room, expressed in Garcin’s recognition that “Hell is other people.”

      Indeed, in this film Sartre’s philosophy seems to fall somewhat apart. In the lives of Inès, Gracin, and Estelle we observe birth, gender, sexuality, dictators, lovers, friends, and religious and social values making most of decisions that the characters find almost impossible to correct. Perhaps war heroes can make existentialist choices, but those sentenced to concentration camps had no choice in their lives, even those who tried to fight, except for the truths their inner beings sought. Although a poor immigrant entering the US for a better life for himself and his family might be perceived as having made a moral existentialist choice, ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials sweeping him up to send him and his children to countries in which he or she has never before lived is not a free act and represents the unfairness of life.

     But, of course, Sartre and others involved with existentialist thought would not deny the meaninglessness or unfairness of the world. Absurdity, according to Camus, is the juxtaposition of the individual and the world around him. In short, life becomes absurd due to the incompatibility between the individual and the world he inhabits. And the choices the individual makes in such a world are what really matters, not the success or failure of those actions.

     This film is fascinating precisely as an impetus of a further exploration of this very subject. But alas, No Exit was not theatrically released in the US and has still to be released by a commercial entertainment company. There is only a DVD, with English subtitles, sold from collector-to-collector services, the source of my personal copy. Although the film is now available on YouTube, the English translation, perhaps achieved through audio response, is a disaster and not to be trusted.

 

Los Angeles, August 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).