One hopes that a film version of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary will have something of the excitement of the 1856 original, whose realism refreshed the art form of the novel. Jean Renoir’s film is one of his string of 1930s masterpieces. The opening is jaw-droppingly brilliant: the camera—in this instance, Emma Bovary’s soul—turns leftward, revealing a patch of trees, in Normandy, on the grounds of country doctor Charles Bovary, eventually stopping at a clearing that allows us to see and hear, in long-shot, farm animals close to the modest house. In a single shot wife Emma’s sparkling dreaminess passes into her squawking/oinking marital reality, where the camera gets stuck.
Renoir’s sensitivity to interior space maintains the film’s great (because functional) beauty. We glimpse Emma at a distance through doorways; when Charles shows her the secondhand carriage he has bought her, even the outdoors is constrained by the open window frame through which we watch them. When her mother-in-law, who lives with the Bovarys, insults Emma, who orders her to leave the house, an archway frames the depth of blackness into which Charles’s mother disappears—a void also threatening to absorb Emma, who stands right at its edge. Women are so vulnerable in this world—a point that the recent death of Charles’s first wife underscores.
The downward trajectory of Emma’s life (adultery, financial stress, sickness, death) is rendered in all its details without excess of melodrama. Thus we are able to see, calmly, the role that money plays in ruining people’s lives. Valentine Tessier is superb as Madame Bovary—not an enigma, like Isabelle Huppert in Claude Chabrol’s fine version (1991), or a sentimentalized, mouth-twitching neurotic, like Jennifer Jones, whose ineptitude reduces Vincente Minnelli’s version (1949) to grating soap opera and inadvertent farce.
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LA RONDE (Max Ophüls, 1950)
August 18, 2008From Arthur Schnitzler’s play Reigen Max Ophüls has created a rueful, wistful meditation on the transience of love, implicitly, life’s transience. It is love’s merry-go-round suited to a waltz—a haunting waltz by Oscar Straus. More: the film itself is a waltz, lovely, lilting, passing, passing into sadness and melancholy: the inevitable end to a waltz. Each romantic couple in turn dissolves; one partner moves on to another partner, while the latter’s predecessor vanishes, having lost his or her place on the merry-go-round. (The film’s soft grays, especially in faux-exterior shots, seem to encourage couples to dissolve and individuals to disappear—or, perhaps, are the result of these happenings.) However, the courtly Count and Army lieutenant (exquisitely played by Gérard Philipe), who leaves one partner to go off on a binge, ends up with the first character to get off the merry-go-round at the beginning of the film, Léocardie (Simone Signoret, nearly as haunting as the waltz), a solemn prostitute.
We are in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. In charge of the merry-go-round is the . . . well, what is he? Beautifully acted by Anton Walbrook, he is the storyteller, stage manager, film director, editor and projectionist. His job, I would say, is to hold back tragedy as best he can. He pops up in other guises: coachman, waiter, servant, etc.; and sometimes as the carousel operator he shares the same frame as one of the characters. This is Ophüls’s delicately postmodernist film; and yet it dreamily conjures the past—a past the memory or dream of which it hopes to keep from dissolving. Opposing this attempt is recent European history: the war, France’s Occupation, the Holocaust.
One is lost when watching a film by him if one forgets that Max Ophüls was Jewish.
Tags:Max Ophüls, Simone Signoret
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