Madame de…
Max Ophüls (1953)
As the ellipsis suggests, we never know the full name of the aristocratic title character, though we do know she’s called Louise. Max Ophüls teases to the very end: the closing shot, in a church, shows a shrine containing a lighted candle, a pair of earrings and a card which reads ‘a gift from Madame de-’. The frame cuts off the rest of the name. In the film’s opening sequence, Ophüls tantalises in a different way. While Louise’s voice is heard from the very start, she takes time to appear. She’s a pair of hands – appraising and caressing her jewellery, furs and gowns – until the camera gradually reaches and reveals the beautiful face of Danielle Darrieux. Louise, who needs urgently to raise money to pay debts incurred by her extravagant lifestyle in Belle Époque Paris, is struggling to decide which of her possessions to sell – she’s so fond of them all. She eventually decides on a pair of heart-shaped diamond earrings, a wedding gift from her husband.
She leaves the house hurriedly and heads for the bijouterie where her husband made the purchase some years ago and she’s become a valued client. After initial hesitation, quelled by the first in a series of tactical fainting fits that Louise resorts to, the jeweller Rémy (Jean Debucourt) agrees to buy back the earrings. The narrative of Madame de… is based, like the change-partners carousel of Ophüls’s La Ronde (1950), on a leitmotif: the earrings’ journey – from one owner to another, across Europe and back. They repeatedly return to Rémy, who repeatedly sells them to Louise’s husband Général André de … (Charles Boyer). André delivers a key line when he tells his unhappy wife that, ‘Our conjugal bliss is a reflection of ourselves: it’s only superficially superficial’. That last phrase applies to the film’s opulent surface and to its story, which describes the transformation of a shallow, pampered (and childless) woman into one who eventually is passionately desperate. Each exchange of the earrings seems to mark a further deepening of her emotional involvement. In the climax to Madame de…, as Louise arrives, too late, to intercept a duel between her husband and her Italian lover, the high-ranking diplomat Baron Fabrizio Donati (Vittorio De Sica), she faints for real.
Critics as hard to please and inclined to disagree with each other as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris concurred on the outstanding excellence of Ophüls’s film. BFI has included it in this month’s programme, marking the centenary of Kael’s birth, of films that she championed. She described Madame de… as ‘perfection’; Sarris went still further in calling it ‘the most perfect film ever made’. It flows meticulously and is hard to fault – unless, that is, you find Louise’s plight uninvolving. I have to confess that, as I watched, I kept wondering if I’d seen this supposedly unforgettable masterpiece before. (If I had, it wasn’t that long ago; it would have been at BFI and therefore between the start of 2003, when I joined, and early 2008, when I started writing notes on what I saw.) It wasn’t until the sustained familiarity of the pistols-at-dawn climax and Louise’s collapse that I was reasonably sure this was a second viewing.
Why so lukewarm? I guess partly because of the classism, which not only assumes engagement with the romantic torments of the highly privileged but also characterises the lower orders, when they do appear, at best perfunctorily and at worst derisively (a couple of guards having a conversation about ‘beans for dinner again’). Danielle Darrieux’s physical development as Louise is remarkable: she ages outside and inside. As her insistently possessive husband, Charles Boyer is, as often, impressive: he has a strongly expressive moment when André, after seeing his wife off at a railway station, walks back along the platform. Both performances are easier to admire than to feel much about, though. The charms of Vittorio De Sica’s well-fed, somewhat vain Donati eluded me. The actor I enjoyed most was Serge Lacointe, who appears briefly as the jeweller Rémy’s teenage son, and looks rather excited that a lady has fainted in the shop. The film was released in the US as The Earrings of Madame de… The screenplay, by Marcel Achard, Ophüls and Annette Wadamant, is adapted from a 1951 novella by Louise de … Vilmorin.
12 June 2019