Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Lola Montès

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Max Ophüls (1955)

    The sort of ill-fated masterpiece I would rather read about than sit through.  Very expensive for its time, the picture was seen as scandalous and a failure on its original release in France and was ruthlessly hacked about by the studio that produced it.  Max Ophüls died little more than a year after the December 1955 premiere.  It’s great that digital technology has allowed the film to be restored this year virtually in its original form – but great because it redeems an act of commercial vandalism rather than because the work is outstanding.

    Almost garishly colourful and shot in Cinemascope, Lola Montès doesn’t at first sight look like a work of European film art but Ophüls’s characteristic swirling camera movement – lateral and vertical – is remarkable (fluent and incisive at the same time); and even I can see that the visual compositions (the steeply-angled shots, the use of mirrors, the characters photographed through lace curtains) are sophisticated and inventive.  Yet the extent to which the look of the film eclipses its dramatic and thematic aspects owes as much to the weakness of the latter as to the beauty of the visuals. Ophüls’s story of the nineteenth-century courtesan and Spanish dancer, Lola Montez (Irish-born, according to Wikipedia), is constructed as a series of flashbacks to her heyday in France and Germany.  These are framed by and eventually converge with scenes in a New Orleans circus, where Lola, past her best, is still one of the star attractions.   The circus, although it becomes integrated with the narrative, is essentially symbolic:  the fact that Lola’s degraded celebrity is put on display in a commercial transatlantic show (although its look and style seem more continental European than American) reinforces Ophüls’s themes of the transience of beauty and fame and of how famous lives are appropriated for popular entertainment.   Yet the script, by Ophüls and Annette Wademant (adapted from a novel by Cécil Saint-Laurent which, according to the BFI note, was itself a potboiler), doesn’t appear to have much else to say.

    That puts pressure on the characters to develop in ways that will sustain the audience’s interest and, as Lola, Martine Carol is sadly (her presence did make me feel sad) lacking in allure and variety.   She is beautiful but – because she has no emotional mobility – it’s an inexpressive beauty.  There’s no real characterisation:  scenes are set up in a way that makes you think you’re meant to see Lola as an irresistible confusion of the demure and the wilfully passionate.  Except for a good bit in public gardens in Montecarlo, when she breaks off from a dance routine to climb up to a balcony to tell a woman she’s having an affair with the woman’s husband, Carol seems rather implacably remote (without the remoteness adding to Lola’s fascination).  Nor is she transformed when she dances.  Andrew Sarris’s piece that provided the BFI handout notes Carol’s ‘inescapable mediocrity’ as an actress;  and presents Ophüls’s understanding of her limitations and sympathetic view of her unsuccessful efforts to rise above them as somehow enhancing the film’s stature.   I don’t really understand this, or why Ophüls didn’t use a more nuanced actress who could express not just what made the character charismatic but also the difference between Lola in her prime and in her decline.  Martine Carol doesn’t convey the poignancy of the ephemeral but the unhappy, unchangeable permanence of a screen performance – even in a film as butchered as this one was – that doesn’t get anywhere.

    The other main actors fare better.  Peter Ustinov as the circus ringmaster has, as well as wit, an authority which is increasingly melancholy.  Anton Walbrook brings an affecting, controlled yearning to the part of the Bavarian king whose mistress Lola becomes.   A young Oskar Werner is vivid and amusing as a student.    But you need to be someone for whom cinematic technique is enough to sustain you through two hours, who doesn’t also need developing themes or interesting interactions between people, to regard this as a great work of art.

    9 November 2008

  • Chéri

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Frears (2009)

    According to Wikipedia, this is the second cinema film of the Colette novel (or, more precisely, novel(la)s – Chéri and The Last of Chéri).  There have also been two TV adaptations and I dimly remember the 1973 BBC version.  Chéri is the love story of a couple for whom having sex is a way of life – a man in his mid-twenties and a woman old enough to be his mother (and who is a longstanding acquaintance of his actual mother). Chéri, as Frédéric Peloux is known, is youthful but dissipated; Léa de Lonval has loved professionally and largely dispassionately.   The affair between them is sparked by physical attraction; it becomes more complicated and difficult when they fall in love.  The picture begins with a scene-setting voiceover, which explains the status of the leading courtesans of fin de siècle and belle époque Paris, as the camera moves around framed photographs of some of the best known of them – Liane de Pougy et al.   It settles eventually on the face of Léa – the face, that is, of Michelle Pfeiffer.  The sepia photograph fools no one:  her look doesn’t fit with the examples of the real thing – it’s too modern.  But once she appears on the screen, Pfeiffer, in physical terms, carries all before her.

    She has a head start in this role:  we knew her as a glorious young actress but she’s been largely absent from the screen in recent years (except for the small part in Hairspray).  Back in a starring role, she’s still beautiful but undeniably older (although she doesn’t look her 51 years).  It’s not just that she’s marvellous to watch, shot by shot.  Pfeiffer has a strong presence:  she knows how to make an entrance and she wears Consolata Boyle’s gowns superbly (it must be very rewarding to design the costumes and see them brought to life like this).  When she stands against an Alma-Tadema balcony and sky in Biarritz, when she races upstairs in reaction to good news, when – in the film’s final shot – the frame freezes on her beautifully defeated face, Pfeiffer is all you could want and more.   Vocally, she’s less persuasive.  At the start, I found her relatively bland voice an interesting idea in itself.  You could believe that a courtesan as lovely and sensually alert as this wouldn’t need to rely on how she spoke as a means of seduction.   But, as the film goes on, a breathy hush settles over too many of Pfeiffer’s lines; except when she’s snappish or in emotional extremity, the rhythm of her readings is monotonous – and she rarely suggests a tension between what Léa says and what she’s actually feeling.

    This is the first time I’ve seen Kathy Bates playing a non-American (she’s Charlotte, Chéri’s mother) and the first time, apart from Titanic, I’ve seen her in period costume earlier than the 1950s.  It’s also the first time I’ve been disappointed by her.  She seems constrained – by the clothes and the dialogue. (It may be no coincidence that the only times she rings true are when she laughs and there are no words to contend with – although she made me laugh with the line, ‘I always thought he was one of the duller kings’.)  Bates is ‘doing a character’ here, effortfully and uncomfortably.  She doesn’t do enough, though, to suggest, for example, Charlotte’s schadenfreude that Léa, who has kept her figure in a way Charlotte hasn’t, still gets to suffer as a result of getting older.   The lack of spark between Bates and Pfeiffer is a real letdown.    We’re given to understand that Léa and Charlotte have met regularly for years without liking each other.  The situation seems to present easy opportunities for being smilingly sociable in a vibrantly insincere way but their exchanges are stiff and colourless.  There’s a risk with this story that Chéri will be vacuously beautiful – a reflection of what Léa sees in him and without much independent life.   This isn’t true of Rupert Friend’s pretty but prematurely debauched Chéri, who occasionally seems stunned by – yet trapped in – his selfish superficiality.  It’s an intelligent performance – if Chéri never becomes the main focus of interest, that’s probably intrinsic to the material rather than a reflection on Friend.   As Chéri’s pure young bride Edmée, Felicity Jones has a strong moment when incredulous laughter turns to convulsive weeping.

    None of the playing is bad but I was surprised that such an accomplished director of actors didn’t orchestrate it more confidently.  If memory serves, Stephen Frears handled the cast expertly in Dangerous Liaisons, his previous collaboration with Pfeiffer (and Christopher Hampton, who has written the screenplay for Chéri).  Perhaps in that film, the Americans were more comfortable in continental European roles because there weren’t any British actors in sizeable parts to confuse the issue and the barbed dialogue was more formally reassuring.  Hampton’s dialogue here, although it seems mostly proficient, is trickier – ‘period’ speech but clearly more casual than the stylised wit of Dangerous Liaisons.   Some of the cast sound careful and self-conscious speaking their lines (Rupert Friend handles the dialogue the most easily).    There are decent actors – like Nicola McAuliffe as a fortune teller, Anita Pallenberg and Harriet Walter as a couple of other sexual pillars of society – whose playing betrays the uncertainty of how to pitch a performance when you’ve only one or two short scenes in which to make an impression.  Frances Tomelty, with a little more screen time as Léa’s maid Rose, is more relaxed and convincing.  Frears himself provides the voiceover narration:  his delivery works well at first – fruity without being actorish – although the unprofessional phrasing makes it gradually less effective.

    All in all, Chéri is dramatically and emotionally underwhelming.  Much of the pleasure to be had is in the technical details of the belle époque – the costumes, the bowls of flowers, the bits of china that we see.  (And the music by Alexandre Desplat is skilful:  it sounds like pastiche to begin with but it turns into something gracefully incisive.)   The film is, in more ways than one, both good looking and lacking in animation – the cinematographer Darius Khondji lights the naked flesh on display in a way that suggests art of the period but not always living bodies.  At one point, Léa wistfully compares her aging arms with the handles of an antique vase and this made me think that Stephen Frears’s whole approach here was rather like that of a man entrusted with a valuable, breakable object.  There are times when it doesn’t pay to be so cautious:  Frears keeps control of his precious goods but the quality that made them precious to start with still somehow slips through his hands.

    17 May 2009

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