MADAME DE…
Sog.: dal romanzo omonimo di Louise de Vilmorin. Scen.: Marcel Achard, Max Ophuls, Annette Wademan. F.: Christian Matras. M.: Borys Lewyn. Scgf.: Jean d’Eaubonne. Mus.: Georges Van Parys. Int.: Danielle Darrieux (Madame de…), Charles Boyer (generale André), Vittorio De Sica (barone Fabrizio Donati), Lia Di Leo (Lola), Paul Azaïs (primo cocchiere), Michel Albert (secondo cocchiere), Madeleine Barbulée (amica di Madame de…), Beauvais (maggiordomo), Jean Degrave (uomo del club). Prod.: Ralph Baum per Franco London Films, Indusfilms, Rizzoli Film. DCP. D.: 100’. Bn.
Film Notes
“Une femme très elegante, très brillante, que tout le monde courtisait…”. So begins a bourgeois fable. Who is that lady, whose hands, shoulders and beautiful neck we glimpse amongst her furs, her gloves, the silk folds of a high-end wardrobe? Is she a courtesan, an everybody’s and nobody’s woman, a madame aux camélias with diamonds hearts taking place of budding flowers? No, she is just a wife, whom marriage consigns to lies and to a fatuous restlessness. Just as the gaze of Max Ophuls is restless, “who hated static camera shots” (Lourcelles). Through the controlled vertigo of movement he pursued the reality (without being bridled by realism); therefore, his camera runs and glides, invents never-before-seen turns and trajectories, as only life itself can do – but only cinema can depict.
Madame de… is Ophuls’s penultimate film. He had returned from America three years previous after two high-standard noirs, Caught and The Reckless Moment, full of newly gained international fame. The films he makes in France between 1950 and 1955, La Ronde, Le Plaisir, Madame de… and Lola Montès, will definitely admit him in the cinephiles’ heaven. Ophuls is now finally free to adapt his work to “the boundlessness of my imagination”. The enchantment of that boundlessness assumes an ancient glow: Danielle Darrieux crosses spacious rooms, descends stairs, appears and reappears in a visual flow of mirrors, palm trees, columns and dancing couples, with the sparkle and languor of a diva in a diva-film.
Madame de… bypasses the melodrama, it misleads and masks it. It does so with the vibrant irony of words (“je ne vous aime pas, ne vous aime pas, ne vous aime pas”), with the military frivolity of a great manoeuvres flair, with Vittorio De Sica’s gentleman disagreement at a border crossing – almost a memory from Signor Max; and it does so with that waltz, which night after night brings ever closer together two who are yet to become lovers, in the most breathtaking moment of all Ophuls’s films and one of the most sublime inventions of all cinema. And yet there are sombre traces; the drape covering a harp, a prayer book falling onto a row of dance shoes (a certain idea of French Catholicism lingers in the background, cruelly pierced by the final close-up image). The melodrama settles the scores with the instruments it possesses since the diva-film era: a pistol shot, consumption, heartbreak. Because that’s what lies beyond the principle of pleasure – whether, like here, in a sad and magnificent passion, or just in a Liebelei.
Paola Cristalli