Having established that at one point in his career Andrew Sarris did indeed proclaim Max Ophuls' 1955 Lola Montes "the greatest film of all time," I now opt to ignore the fact that he called a few other films—some of them Ophuls pictures!—something similar, and focus on the claim for Lola Montes, and speculate on why one would make it. From a superficial perspective, Lola Montes, which was released in what is likely to be its definitive version by The Criterion Collection on standard-definition DVD and Blu-ray disc yesterday, would appear to be at very most a specialty item for severe auteurists, an ornate melodrama about a 19th-century maneater with some added cinephilic value rather than anything like "the greatest film" of any time. After all, it is hardly a groundbreaking, polyglot, underhandedly high-modernist creation the way that Citizen Kane is. Is it? In other words, what's the big deal?
Well, this is one of those cases where what we former English lit majors used to call "close reading" certainly helps. But as this is a blog and not an academic journal, what I'm going to do here is take brief stock of several aspects of the film, aspects which, put together, begin to form its claim to greatness. And then discuss the one aspect which troubles that claim.
1) STRUCTURE: Like Kane, this is a picture that has one foot in the present and another foot in the past. Or, rather, not quite. All of Lola is set in the past, opening at the end of the title character's life, as it were, when the once-celebrated lady has been brought down to the extent that she's now a circus attraction, her exploits narrated by the ringmaster played by Peter Ustinov. This portion is set around the year 1851 or so, flashing back to the around the early 1830s and past that. The 1941 Kane, of course, kicks of in what was then the present day. Its flashback structure (the films' screenplay is by Ophuls, Annette Wadement, and Jacques Natanson) is more immediately "dazzling" than that of Ophuls' film, because the stories of Kane are told in different voices, by different characters, and each flashback has not just a different setting but a different tone, a different cinematic style. Different narrators are shown, not just heard, contradicting each other. The effect is heady.
In point of fact, the flashback structure of Lola Montes, which is not as linear as one might believe it to be on the first couple of viewings—the viewer does tend to unconsciously categorize and arrange certain scenes to "straighten" things out in his or her memory—is arguably even more sophisticated than that of Kane's, albeit in a somewhat more literary way. Every scene, despite its deviation from chronology, pushes each of the film's themes in what you could call an ineluctable fashion and creates a kind of cinematic echo chamber of exquisite ironies, not the least of which is the fact that Lola's final exploiter, the circus ringmaster, is in his way hopelessly in love with her. To say that this aspect of the film alone repays repeat viewings is to thoroughly understate the case.
2) VISUAL STYLE: This was Ophuls first, and last, film in color, and cinematographer Christian Matras shot in a widescreen format even grander than "normal" Cinemascope, which tends to settle at around 2.35:1 even though the anamorphic lenses could produce a ratio of 2.66:1. Here the dimensions are 2.55:1. What this means, first off, are some added values to Ophuls' trademark moving camera, which given Lola's high-pressure acrobatic exertions in her later life and the way she and her consorts get the servants scurrying over multiple floors in her earlier life, ascends and dives and swoops quite regularly. And beautifully, and elegantly. Jean d'Eaubonne's production design is staggering, as is Georges Anankov's costume work—the leopardskin collar on Ustinov's overcoat, what a magnificent touch!—but what delights and intrigues here in what feels like a new way for Ophuls are the compositions. Lola Montes is, in every shot, the work of someone upon whom nothing is lost. The manipulation of the frame via various iris effects is always acute. The way portions of the decor are made to act upon the human players entirely inspired. Consider this frame, in which Lola's ultra-loyal maid delivers a note:
The picture teems with these kind of divisions within a given frame, putting all the characters in their "place" as it were. It's formidable.
3) INTELLECTUAL CONTENT: The circus setting that Lola's story is framed within is hardly a benign one but rather a grotesque carnival of commerce and commodification. Ophuls' critique of celebrity culture and the society of the spectacle is not below this film's surface, it's right on the film's surface, but goes deeper still.
But I cannot leave off without addressing what many other critics have noted as the film's major weakness: Martine Carol in the title role. Some accounts of her claim she was French cinema's reigning sex queen in the '50s; I have to say, for myself, and that aspect of things, she falls squarely and flatly into the "DNFM" category. (That's "Does Nothing For Me.") Of course part of Ophuls' strategy with respect to Carol's sex appeal was withholding, which for someone in my situation kind of compounds the problem. And then there are Carol's limited acting gifts. In her informative but sometimes awkward and halting commentary on the film on the Criterion editions, Susan White, author of The Cinema of Max Ophuls, frequently defens Carol's performance, and it's true she's not phoning it in. The problem is that what she's not phoning in isn't all that much, to my eyes. Sometimes I look at the film and I contemplate how much greater it might have been with someone more apt and talented in the role. Michéle Morgan. Brigitte Bardot. Shirley Booth. All right, maybe not her. Still. I don't like Carol in this.
But you should of course have a look or five at this picture anyway, and fast.
Recent Comments