Lola Montès, Max Ophüls’s final, uneven, but intermittently most brilliant film, projects twentieth-century self-objectification and selfconsciousness back into the nineteenth to address the emergence of the idea of celebrity. Its case in point is an actual celebrity, Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, a.k.a. Lola Montès, ersatz dancer, acrobat, and scandalous lover, including of King Ludwig I of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook, superb), who was dethroned by the 1848 Revolution.
The film’s point of departure is a circus whose focus is Lola’s life; Lola (Martine Carol, as untalented as Lola) plays herself. The ringmaster, knowing the public that his audience represents, describes her: “A master of cruelty with the eyes of an angel.” A human being is thus reduced to a caricature, a “femme fatale.” “Remember the past?” This question signals a “realistic” flashback; but is it reality or a reaction to the theatrical performance? Franz Liszt is the first of Lola’s lovers to appear. Liszt leaves Lola by coach; cut to Liszt’s coach departing from the circus stage. Similar confusions of theatricality and life ensue.
Lola’s childhood is given short shrift—another reduction of her. Backstage, Lola asks the child who plays her, “Would you like to play the part for the rest of your life?” The implication is that “Lola” is just such a role for Lola. “I do as I please,” she insists, but her unhappy marriage to a drunk was her way of escaping the marriage that her mother had planned for her.
With a weak heart poised to stop her life/performance at any moment, Lola ends, a caged commodity, as the camera withdraws and a new audience, our surrogate, moves forward to enter the tent. We who thrive on celebrity are the ones who have reduced Lola. The camera retreats into us.
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