A woman, known only as Elle ("She"), has a nightmare in which she encounters a man chained to a tree above a blazing pyre into which he tries to pull her by the hair, an elegant gentleman in evening dress who pursues her into an opium den full of dazed women, a bishop who instructs her to return to her home, and a ragged beggar who attempts to embrace her before stabbing himself.
He wants to take her away from the temptations of Paris, back to his home country in South America, but his plan is impeded by her resistance and by a burglary in which some important documents have been stolen.
At the port of Le Havre, the husband tells his wife that he has forgotten to give Z his promised fee and he asks her to travel quickly to Paris to deliver it in person.
[1][2] In his preparatory notes for the production, Mosjoukine wrote that his subject was the love between a man and a woman, and it made no claim to originality or to moral or philosophical significance.
"[5] The film features two sequences of rapid editing, a practice then in vogue among French avant-garde film-makers (following Abel Gance's notable demonstrations of it in La Roue, released early in 1923).
One is used in the first section of the opening nightmare scene, conveying the woman's sense of panic as she is pulled ever closer to the flames of the burning pyre.
[7] The film theorist Ricciotto Canudo praised the freshness and ambition of Mosjoukine's conception, and his ability to construct a genuinely symbolic drama, but he expressed reservations about the mixture of visual styles ("visionary and magnificent" at the beginning but lapsing later into "an often irritating realism" of sentimental comedy).
"[8] Other commentators also highlighted the film's unfamiliar form and unusual blending of genres, with one of them making comparison with D. W. Griffith's recently released comic mystery drama, One Exciting Night, as well as finding other reference points in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and in Cubism; the result was a psychological fantasy of a kind not previously seen.
[1] A restored copy of Le Brasier ardent, tinted and toned, and based on the original negative at the Cinémathèque française, was included in a DVD set of Films Albatros productions issued by Flicker Alley in 2013 under the title "French masterworks: Russian emigrés in Paris 1923-1929".
"[12] Another found more modern points of comparison for the film's visual extravagance: "The movie opens with a burst of wild imagery ...in which Mosjoukine appears in roles as widely varied as a martyr burning at the stake and a silk-hatted roué visiting the sort of underground cabaret-brothel-opium-den that David Lynch would be conjuring 70 years later.