THANK YOU FOR YOUR LIE: FILMS BY MAX OPHULS
“It is in the four late French films, all of which are mostly centered on women, that Ophuls’s obsession with mobile camera work is allowed its fullest liberty and extravagance. Some find it excessive, a mannerism reveled in for its own sake, but there is generally a justification for what may look like self-indulgence: after all, if for Ophuls ‘life is movement,’ then this constant mobility is the expression of a metaphysic.” — Robin Wood
Films in this Program
Max Ophüls
95 minutes
Simone Signoret, Anton Walbrook, and Simone Simon lead a roundelay of French stars in Max Ophüls's delightful, acerbic adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's controversial turn-of-the-century play. Set in the Vienna of the waltz, this exquisite and witty film describes love’s ceaseless roundabout, starting with a sex worker, who loves a soldier, who leaves her for a chambermaid, who . . . etc., etc., until the story comes back to the sex worker in this merry-go-round of love and infidelity. Here the normal narrow view of movie stories, always going forward towards destiny and resolution, is abandoned in favor of the more mocking designs of hazard, obliqueness, and digression, a dance in which the dancers do not hear the beat but in which they revert helplessly to where they began, older and no wiser.
"LA RONDE is a supremely graceful piece of work, impeccably staged by Ophüls and shot with almost preternatural fluency, but it is at its core a celebration of the peculiar, elusive art of acting." - Terrence Rafferty
"LA RONDE is a supremely graceful piece of work, impeccably staged by Ophüls and shot with almost preternatural fluency, but it is at its core a celebration of the peculiar, elusive art of acting." - Terrence Rafferty
Max Ophüls
97 minutes
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!
Max Ophüls
105 minutes
The most cherished work from French master Max Ophüls, THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE... is a profoundly emotional, cinematographically adventurous tale of deceptive opulence and tragic romance. When an aristocratic woman known only as Madame de... (Danielle Darrieux) sells a pair of earrings given to her by her husband (Charles Boyer) in order to pay some debts, she sets off a chain reaction of financial and carnal consequences that can end only in despair. Ophüls' adaptation of Louise de Vilmorin’s incisive fin de siècle novel employs to ravishing effect the elegant and precise camera work for which the director is so justly renowned.
"The titular jewels of THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE... provide not just the axis around which the film’s elegantly darkening roundelay turns, but also a telling stand-in for the essence of Max Ophüls’s art—an object of glittering surfaces which, through an astounding accumulation of passion, comes to embody devastating depths of feeling. Evanescence is an integral part of cinema, and no other director captured it as lyrically and yet as savagely as Ophüls. His tracking, dollying, gliding camera was never more mellifluous, or his visualization of life’s inexorable flow more tangible, than here." - Fernando F. Croce
"The titular jewels of THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE... provide not just the axis around which the film’s elegantly darkening roundelay turns, but also a telling stand-in for the essence of Max Ophüls’s art—an object of glittering surfaces which, through an astounding accumulation of passion, comes to embody devastating depths of feeling. Evanescence is an integral part of cinema, and no other director captured it as lyrically and yet as savagely as Ophüls. His tracking, dollying, gliding camera was never more mellifluous, or his visualization of life’s inexorable flow more tangible, than here." - Fernando F. Croce
Max Ophüls
114 minutes
LOLA MONTES is a visually ravishing, narratively daring dramatization of the life of the notorious courtesan and showgirl, played by Martine Carol. With his customary cinematographic flourish and, for the first time, vibrant color, Max Ophüls charts the course of Montes’s scandalous past through the invocations of the bombastic ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) of the American circus where she has ended up performing. Ophüls' final film, LOLA MONTES is at once a magnificent romantic melodrama, a meditation on the lurid fascination with celebrity, and a one-of-a-kind movie spectacle.
"A bodice-ripper invested with the profundity of a Stendhal novel, LOLA MONTES is also Ophüls’s definite commentary on movie-watching, his boldest vision of film as a medium that reveres beauty in order to both nurture and mock dreams. After their own sobering affair with the film, viewers are left to echo Liszt’s compliment to Lola: 'Thank you for the illusion.'" - Fernando F. Croce
"A bodice-ripper invested with the profundity of a Stendhal novel, LOLA MONTES is also Ophüls’s definite commentary on movie-watching, his boldest vision of film as a medium that reveres beauty in order to both nurture and mock dreams. After their own sobering affair with the film, viewers are left to echo Liszt’s compliment to Lola: 'Thank you for the illusion.'" - Fernando F. Croce
