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| Le Plaisir | |||
"Ophüls’ second French film following his return from the USA was adapted from three stories by Maupassant. Le masque describes how an old man wears a mask of youth at a dance hall to extend his youthful memories. La maison tellier, the longest episode, deals with a day’s outing for the ladies from a brothel, and a brief romance. In Le modéle, the model in question jumps from a window for love of an artist, who then marries her. Although Ophüls had to drop a fourth story intended to contrast pleasure and death, these three on old age, purity and marriage are shot with a supreme elegance and sympathy, and the central tale in particular luxuriates in the Normandy countryside". – Time Out Film Guide "“I’m delighted to speak to you in the dark, as if seated right beside you… and perhaps I am,” seductively drawls the narrator opening Max Ophüls’ Le plaisir. “You can imagine my anxiety, for these are old tales, and you’re so terribly modern.” Ophuls’ unjustifiably neglected and aptly named 1952 masterpiece, based on three short stories by Guy de Maupassant, is all of those things: terribly modern, seductive, and dark. Sinking into Le plaisir, the contemporary viewer is swept away by staged fantasies, lavishly artificial sets; and yet through all the mannered sophistication glimmers a consistent, astonishingly empathic, human sensibility. More than just the rare literary adaptation that lives up to its source, Le plaisir skips lightly, valiantly ahead. At once filling in, questioning and subverting Maupassant’s narrations, Ophüls’ camera eye is both more intelligent and more kind. Competition between the two arts of literature and film — between the verbal and visual storyteller — is coded from the narrator/Maupassant’s opening words: “Various ways have been sought to present my stories to you. I thought the simplest way would be to tell you them myself…” This, of course, is what Ophüls never allows him to do. Le plaisir’s stories are neither simple nor “told”: they are an excuse for self-conscious cinema, exuberantly exploring its own possibilities and charmingly showing them off. And yet (and this is why I think Le plaisir is a rare cinematic masterpiece) while Ophüls piles on the visual beauty, he subtly demonstrates that what he is adding is of far greater import than mere decoration. His stories take Maupassant’s worldly wisdom and glamorous cynicism and imbue spirituality and compassion. Beauty, in Ophüls, may come very close to saving the world." – Marijeta Bozovic, PopMatters "Throughout Le plaisir, Ophüls is scrupulously faithful to Maupassant’s texts, yet one always senses a subtle difference in sensibility that can be summed up in one word: cynicism, pervasive in Maupassant, almost totally absent in Ophüls. Maupassant’s cynicism is his way of looking down on his characters, establishing his man-of-the-world superiority. Ophüls substitutes tenderness and never sets himself apart." – Robin Wood, criterion.com |
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| France 1952 | |||
Director: Max Ophüls With: Claude Dauphin, Gaby Morlay, Madeleine Renaud, Ginette Leclerc, Mila Parely, Danielle Darrieux, Pierre Brasseur, Jean Gabin, Jean Servais, Daniel Gelin, Simone Simon 97mins, 35mm (1,37:1), black and white In French, with English subtitles R16 cert Dunedin Film Society |
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