The Marquise of O
Die Marquise von O…
Eric Rohmer (1976)
The film of The Marquise of O has an international pedigree. The director, who also wrote the screenplay, is French. The characters in the 1808 novella on which the screenplay is based are Italians and Russians. Heinrich von Kleist, the novella’s author, was German. So are most of Eric Rohmer’s actors (if they’re not, they’re German Swiss or Austrian) and German is the language spoken in the picture. It’s difficult for an English-speaking audience – a monolingual one, at any rate – to see the people on screen as anything but German. Although this flattening out of ethnic differences among the characters is in one sense problematic, I think it also, in effect, helps to make The Marquise of O intriguing.
The setting is ‘M …’ – ‘a town in northern Italy’ – during the Napoleonic Wars. The first scene takes place in a local tavern, where three men are discussing an extraordinary announcement, placed in a newspaper by the Marquise of ‘O …’ In it, she explains that she is unaccountably pregnant, and wishes the father of the child she’s expecting to present himself and marry her. One of the fellows in the tavern finds the announcement a laughing matter but his companions are shocked, in view of the social distinction of the Marquise’s family and her own, hitherto irreproachable, moral character. The description of the events that have led up to the piece in the newspaper forms a large part of the story that follows. A citadel in M … is overrun by Russian forces. Julietta (Edith Clever), the titular marquise, is the daughter of the citadel commandant. A widow with two young children, she is about to be raped by a group of Russian soldiers when their compatriot, ‘the Count’, intervenes to prevent the assault. The traumatised Julietta is put to bed by her servants and given poppy seed tea to help her sleep. The Russian troops, having secured the commandant’s surrender, depart next morning. Sorry not to have been able to thank the Count for saving her honour, Julietta is – as are her grateful parents – dismayed to hear a few days later that he has been killed in battle. The report turns out to be inaccurate: some time later, the Count presents himself at the family home and asks for the Marquise’s hand in marriage, indicating that he must do so to set his mind at rest. Although she had resolved on her first husband’s death never to remarry, Julietta feels that her debt to the Count is such that she should accept his proposal. Her father advises the Count to go to his next posting, in Naples, which is expected to last a few weeks, then return to claim his bride. The Marquise has already begun to experience symptoms very similar to those she remembers from when she was pregnant during her marriage. While the Count is in Naples, a doctor and a midwife both confirm to the horrified and incredulous Julietta that she is indeed expecting another child. Her appalled parents banish her from their home. She takes refuge, with her children, in her late husband’s country house and, in desperation, places the public announcement.
The Kleist book also opens with that announcement and Eric Rohmer follows the original closely, except in one important respect. In the novella, it’s soon clear that the Count had intercourse with the Marquise and that the rape was an impulsive act – one that took place in the dark and amid much confusion. In the film, Rohmer implies that the rape occurred after Julietta had been rescued and while she was sedated. He also supplies a second potential impregnator: both the Count and a young servant, Leopardo (Bernhard Frey), are shown looking meaningfully at the Marquise, as she lies sleeping. (As Gordon Gow points out in his Films and Filming review, which the BFI used as their programme note for the screening of The Marquise of O, the attitude of Julietta’s unconscious form calls to mind the female figure in Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare.) The story reveals a considerable amount of deception, self-deception and tunnel vision on the part of its principal characters: unless there’s even more dissimulation going on than I realised, it’s eventually confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that it was the Count who impregnated the Marquise. Changing what he does from a heat-of-the-moment sexual act into a more considered one is significant in two ways. It turns Kleist’s hot-blooded Count into a man who fits more easily into the tradition of thoughtful male protagonists established in Rohmer’s ‘contes moraux’. (The Marquise of O was his next feature film after Love in the Afternoon, the last of the six moral tales, in 1972.) It also means that casting the saturnine, reflective Bruno Ganz in the role makes more sense than it would have if the Count had, as in Kleist’s story, been motivated by immediate erotic compulsion.
Rohmer’s adjustments are still not wholly satisfactory, though. First, the setting up of Leopardo as a possible alternative rapist is a very obvious manoeuvre to keep the viewer guessing. One’s pretty sure it can’t be him – that would be too simple a violation of order in the complex world of class-ridden assumptions that the film constructs and explores. Second, Rohmer appears to leave the Count’s impulsiveness intact for the rest of the story – particularly in his behaviour when he returns to propose marriage and is willing to jeopardise his military career for the sake of winning Julietta. Third, nothing in Bruno Ganz’s persona suggests a nationality-based temperamental difference from the Marquise’s family (albeit that Ganz himself is Swiss, not German): one can’t help feeling that such a difference is needed. Yet these weaknesses increase the unusually absorbing nature of this film. It’s difficult for a modern audience to appreciate in any case the imperatives of the time and social setting of The Marquise of O. Julietta is horrified to discover that the Count is the father of her child. They marry but, having done so, live apart until, in the film’s final scene, she explains that she would not have considered the Count such a ‘devil’ had she not first seen him as the ‘angel’ who saved her from the other Russian soldiers. (The Marquise finally accepts the Count: in the last shot, they embrace happily.) It’s less clear why her parents don’t suspect the Count at an earlier stage. Is it taken as read that an aristocrat (even an aristocrat from an invading country) could not have committed such an act? Or are the commandant and his wife, like their daughter, blinded by the Count’s heroism in seeing off the army colleagues who were about to rape Julietta? One watches the film in a state of fascinated puzzlement – a feeling that’s only increased by the fact that Bruno Ganz is a particularly strong screen presence, his Russian comes across as no different from the Italians, and they all seem to be German anyway!
As the Marquise, Edith Clever has a blend of emotional transparency and comic sense that is very appealing – and it’s refreshing after the moral tales to see a female point of view dominate in an Eric Rohmer film. Rohmer balances Julietta’s genuine distress and the farcically changing attitudes of her parents (Edda Seippel and Peter Lühr) and brother (Otto Sander) very skilfully. The moment when her father sees that he’s misjudged his innocent daughter and kisses her repeatedly has an incestuous charge that’s all the stronger for being unexpected. Rohmer leaves little doubt as to the literary origins of the material: if anything, there are too many intertitles explaining the passage of time etc. The film is wonderfully lit by Nestor Almendros. The lustrous colour frequently gives the images a once-upon-a-time, storybook quality – this is not only lovely to look at but, thanks to the moral convolutions of the narrative, amusingly ironic. The tendency to film in ‘natural light’ is nowadays obscuring an increasing number of cinema and prestige television period pieces. It’s especially pleasing to see Rohmer and Almendros forego this kind of visual realism in the important nocturnal sequences at the start of The Marquise of O.
29 January 2015