Max Ophuls, 1955
About halfway through this review I came to a rather startling realization: I have made every single boyfriend I have ever had watch Lola Montes, the final film by Max Ophuls, restored in 2008 and just released on DVD by Criterion. And I immediately knew that this was not a simple case of wanting to share something you love with someone you love, no this was something borderline pathological. In my alarmingly persistent, naïve belief that films can express things humans sometimes can’t, I was desperately trying to communicate something across that rocky chasm of gender difference: watch this, and you’ll understand. Now given that Lola is the story of a dancer/courtesan whose exploits are turned into a circus act, one might deduce that I have a rather aggrandized opinion of myself, and that may still be true. Neverheless, I’ll maintain that, with Lola, Ophuls manages a highly successful marriage of the thematic and the visual, and in so doing makes a point about being a woman that no other film has made.
The whole circus milieu sets up the
dialectic between authenticity and deception; and Ophuls make stylistic choices
to heighten a sense of unreality. He uses supernatural colors to metaphorasize
emotion, and treats them in arresting ways. In some places the colors are
washed out, in others they are supersaturated. The result is a rather engaging
sense of depth. If you'll excuse the rather unOphulsian conceit, the whole
thing has the look of a video game space you can penetrate and move around in.
It all adds up to one of the most uncanny cinematic experiences I've ever had.
Color is just
one of the aspects of the film deployed to further the look and theme of
artificiality. Ophuls also adorned the trees with gold paint and inserted
cardboard cutouts among the live extras in the circus tent. (It is a testament to the quality of
the restoration that I could finally see this flourish, much rhapsodized over
by my professors, with my own eyes.) This all ties in to Ophuls's commentary on the performativity
and artificiality of femininity, made manifest on the narrative level. Few
women will have to answer questions about their underwear and their
measurements in front of a full house, or climb on an escalating series of
balance beams while their love affairs are detailed, or take a swan dive while
they are literally dying. But the emotions these scenarios incite speak to a
universal feminine.
To the color and the artificial flourishes Ophuls adds a claustrophobic, overstuffed mise-en-scène. Stained glass, wood panels, and heavy drapery often obstruct our view of the action; the camera has to weave in and out of various edifices in order to grant us access to this world. It’s the ultimate cinematic meta-tease; this seeing through obstacles echoes the voyeurism inherent in the circus, while, of course, also calling to mind the voyeurism of the film spectator. But do we ever really get our money’s worth? u Woman may be the ultimate spectacle, but even if you pony up a dollar to touch her hand, she remains ultimately unknowable.
Camera movement is Ophuls’s
trademark; cinephiles get all gay for his tracking shots. On this front, Lola does not disappoint; the camera
follows its subjects up and down spiral staircases, over and across balconies,
around the circus ring and up, up, up to the big top. This creates an effect of remarkable grace and ease. The
fluidity and intangibility of life – for now, Lola is at the top of the world,
but we know where she’ll end up – are given articulate expression.
Controversy
rages as to whether the rest of the film lives up to Ophuls’s lofty artistic
ideals. Martine Carol's performance as Lola is often debated but more often
derided. A star of fluffy corset dramas, Carol was most famous for the
real-life escapade of chucking herself into the Seine after a disappointing
love affair. (She lived to film
Lola.) When some crewmembers expressed concerns about her acting, Ophuls
reportedly replied, "The worse she is, the better for us." That being
said, it's easy to dismiss the results as a case of "so bad it's
good.," but I like her performance a little more every time I see the film.
It has an appropriately unjustified haughty self-assurance about it, and if she
fails to reach emotional transcendence in the melodramatic moments, she at
least goes big enough to achieve something worth noticing. And, of course,
Ophuls had the last laugh: Carol’s forced tears and heaving bosom played right
into his notion of womanhood as performance.
Fortunately Carol’s male counterparts are beyond reproach. Peter Ustinov shines as the circus’s deadpan master of ceremonies; he moves his considerate heft around the ring with a dapper gravitas; he invites viewers to indulge in a simulation of Lola’s “boudoir” in a thrillingly droll voice. And attention, as always must be paid to Anton Walbrook. Best known as the intense impresario of Powell and Presssbuger’s The Red Shoes, Walbrook turned in refined, nuanced performances as Continental charmers in Ophuls’s films. Here he brings the requisite stately dignity to the role of the King of Bavaria while leaving room for the delicacy and whimsy required of a man in love late in life.
In addition to the high definition digital transfer, Criterion’s two-disc set includes a commentary track by Susan White, as well as a French documentary on Ophuls and a making-of piece by Marcel Ophuls (he directed the World War II documentary The Sorrow and the Pity). The set also includes a booklet with a critical essay by Gary Giddins.
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