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LE PLAISIR
1952
Director
Max Ophüls
Starring
Claude Dauphin
Jean Galland
Gaby Morlay
Madeleine Renaud
Daniel Gélin
Runtime
97 minutes
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Roving with his dazzlingly mobile camera around the decadent ballrooms, bucolic countryside retreats, urban bordellos, and painter's studios of late nineteenth-century French life, Max Ophüls brings his astonishing visual dexterity and storytelling bravura to this triptych of tales by Guy de Maupassant about the limits of spiritual and physical pleasure.
In the first, an old man temporarily regains his youth by wearing a magic mask to a ball; in the second, a group of sex workers go on an annual country outing; and in the last, a painter who makes mistresses of his models is forced to marry one after she attempts suicide. One of Ophüls' most lavish films, the intensely pleasurable LE PLAISIR has a stringent elegance that intensifies its emotional impact. (Be prepared to weep a little in the countryside church.) As the film reminds us, happiness is no lark.
Named by Jean-Luc Godard as the best film made in postwar France!
In the first, an old man temporarily regains his youth by wearing a magic mask to a ball; in the second, a group of sex workers go on an annual country outing; and in the last, a painter who makes mistresses of his models is forced to marry one after she attempts suicide. One of Ophüls' most lavish films, the intensely pleasurable LE PLAISIR has a stringent elegance that intensifies its emotional impact. (Be prepared to weep a little in the countryside church.) As the film reminds us, happiness is no lark.
Named by Jean-Luc Godard as the best film made in postwar France!