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.
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.
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.
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).
