L’amour fou. Made in 1987, A Flame in My Heart is a true collaboration between director Tanner (Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000, La Salamander) and actress Mezieres (who has appeared in numerous Tanner films). A script emerged on the basis of conversational notes and was shot quickly in 16-mm black-and-white (later blown up to 35-mm) on a relatively miniscule budget with an intimate crew of four people. It’s a deliberate portrait of obsessive love, at times so deliberate that it becomes little more than a self-conscious diagram but at other times so searing that it threatens the safety of fictional distance. As the movie begins, Mercedes is an actress ending a love affair with Johnny, whose dogged sexual and possessive obsession with her overwhelms Mercedes’ strength to resist. Breaking free, she rides the subway until she picks up a stranger named Pierre, immediately makes love to him and embarks on a quid pro quo obsessive love of her own. When Pierre has to leave town for two weeks on a job assignment, Merecedes holes up in his apartment and becomes an emotional shambles, a la Repulsion. On stage she can no longer remember her lines and loses her role, she eats nothing but Corn Flakes, she cuts the phone cord in the apartment because the ringing drives her crazy, she masturbates compulsively to the TV. The frequent sex and sexual scenes that are so integral to this story indeed approach the realm of the hardcore except that they are so frank and non-prurient that they cause you to question the actual nature of what is going on here. Still, though they may not titillate, they may, nevertheless, embarrass. And it’s at times like these that you may begin to wonder exactly what the point of all this is. To be sure, there’s an admirable performance here by Mezieres who gets to display a vast emotional range and creates a forceful portrait of intimate behavior. By the time Mercedes travels with Pierre to exotic, eternal Cairo on his next assignment, the movie feels like it’s lost all track of where it was ever headed. Instead of resolution or deliverance or denouement or detumescence, we’re left in an endless loop. A Flame in My Heart is all fire and no smoke.
This article appears in August 30 • 1991 (Cover).
