Director Max
Ophüls spent a few frustrating years in Hollywood while the Nazis were in power
in his native Germany, then moved to France after World War II and made four
films noteworthy for their clever narrative construction and sweeping
theatricality. Ophüls' work in the '50s followed aristocrats and commoners
alike as they hopped from bed to bed, taking pleasure in the defiance of social
and sexual convention without realizing how typical they actually were. Ophüls
staged their stories as a series of short, expertly crafted scenes, in which
the actors dwelled on the comic subtleties of human interaction while Ophüls
moved the camera around them at odd angles, like an eavesdropper craning his
neck to take it all in.
Ophüls'
landmark run began with 1950's La Ronde,
based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler, whose work later formed the basis for
Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
Divided into 12 vignettes, La Ronde
begins with a prostitute who picks up a soldier, then continues with the
soldier and a housemaid, then the housemaid and her young master, and so on.
The characters are sketchy by design, but the set design is wondrously opulent,
and Ophüls cleverly picks up on Schnitzler's central theme, about how sexual
desire erases class distinctions. La Ronde is also about what happens the morning after, with some partners
smitten, and others in a hurry to escape.
The 1952
anthology film Le Plaisir adapts three
Guy de Maupassant short stories and is subsequently a little more scattershot,
ranging from the pat and ironic to the deliriously grotesque to the heartbreakingly
wise and lovely. ("La Maison Tellier" represents the latter with its nuanced
tale of a brothel that closes for a night and befuddles its regular customers.)
But Ophüls followed Le Plaisir
with a film that completes the thought he started with La Ronde. In 1953's The Earrings Of Madame De…, Danielle Darrieux plays a general's wife who hocks
some jewelry to pay a debt, then later gets the jewels back, after they've been
passed around a small circle of secret lovers. The style, tone, and even the
music of Madame De… all help
define a group of people who make outward shows of happiness, yet see reminders
of what they're missing in every mirror and every bauble. Like nearly all Ophüls
characters, the society dames and gents of Madame De… feel independent, but are pulled along by
circumstance, and by the choices they make in the throes of passion.
Key features: Somewhat stiff, scholarly commentaries on La
Ronde and Madame De…, loving
introductions by Paul Thomas Anderson (on Madame De…) and Todd Haynes (on Le Plaisir), and an assortment of interviews and shot-by-shot
analyses on each.