Sunday, April 2, 2017
092 - Le Plaisir, 1952, France. Dir. Max Ophuls.
1. THE MASK
A crowd is coming to the theater. The Dancing Palace. To listen to live music and to dance.
The man in the mask comes.
He races through the lobby, up the stairs, to the dance floor, and begins dancing!
He has enormous energy. He knows the steps. The others have enormous energy. They know the steps.
The narrator tells us that he dances awkwardly. He begins to dance awkwardly, throwing up his arms above his head, tilting side to side.
He and the woman, his dance partner, talk between steps. They seem to hit it off.
He collapses.
They carry him out. Lay him on a table. A doctor cuts off his jacket and shirt with scissors.
A fellow man carries him home in a horse and buggy. They arrive. The narrator tells us it is a grimy apartment building filled with desperate people.
The wife receives him coldly.
"It's not the first time he's landed on his face from frolicking around."
It turns out he is an older man. He hides his age behind his mask. He wishes to enjoy life.
He wishes to recapture his youth.
2. THE HOUSE OF TELLIER
A husband and wife, The Telliers, establish a house of pleasure. The husband dies. The wife runs it. The men of the town love it.
One day the light is off. The house is closed. The men as they arrive meet one another. They discover that each of them has been coming. They do not know what to do.
Meanwhile, the woman have gone out to the country. Madame Tellier's brother lives there. His niece is going to have First Communion. They have come to attend it. To support her.
They get fresh air. Her brother, Joseph, falls for one of the girls, Rosa. They attend the communion.
While the women are in church, something happens to them. They sense a divine presence. It washes over them. They weep.
When they return, they are filled with joy. The men of the town arrive, without knowing how they know that they are back, and everyone celebrates. Something about the women is different. They are filled with joy. They share it with the town.
3. THE MODEL
A painter paints. He is stuck. He is frustrated.
Until he meets model. And she transforms him. He falls in love. He woos her. They live in bliss.
Until they no longer do. Life settles in. They grow tired of one another. The first rush of infatuation fades. The feelings leave. They have to negotiate the tedium of daily routine.
He writes her a letter, sends her money, says goodbye. She refuses. Arrives at his place. Demands he keep her. Says she will jump out the window if he does not. A friend explains to her that his family requires him to marry someone else.
She jumps in anyway. She breaks her legs. He marries her quickly out of impulse.
They live somethingly ever after.
* * * * *
This film is based on three short stories by Guy De Maupassant.
It is three separate short films combined. They are unrelated. Ophuls ties to connect them through the theme of pleasure. 1) Pleasure and youth. 2) Pleasure and purity. 3) Pleasure and death. But that is a stretch.
This kind of picture is called an "anthology film." Some recent examples include New York Stories (1989), Four Rooms (1995), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Paris, I Love You (2006), and To Each His Own Cinema (2007).
Filmmakers who make them often say they wish they had not.
Or they were happy they did but did it for some artistic reason knowing that they would not make money.
In this case, we do not have three thirds. We have a very shirt first piece, a long middle piece, and a moderately short third piece. Ophuls could have taken the middle piece and expanded it into its own feature. Or he could have taken the middle piece and cut out all the unnecessary parts.
Recently I have called some of the scripts taut or tightly written, with nothing extraneous. The middle section of this film has plenty of material that is extraneous.
When you make a movie, the source material matters. How you use it matters even more.
Having said that, Ophuls approaches the material with his usual magic touch and daring. Le Plaisir was rightly nominated for an Oscar for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black and White. It is a beautiful film to watch, especially in the city where he can control the buildings in a sound stage and fill them with beautiful props, set pieces, and furniture through which to weave his ever-moving camera.
Sometimes we stay outside the Tellier House and move around looking through windows while the action goes on freely inside, with everything perfectly choreographed to arrive at our window at the right time.
If you are an aspiring filmmaker, then Max Ophuls is someone for you to study. Closely.
There is also a moment in the middle short film that arrests in its honesty.
Ophuls films spirituality. Simply. Without irony. Without comment. And achieves it.
When the women sit in church during First Communion, they sense the presence of God.
The organist plays the hymn.
"Nearer My God to Thee."
The acolytes walk forward with their long cross candles. The choir sings. The camera pans across the iconography of the church. We cut to an exterior low angle shot, looking up at the steeple and the cross. The choir sings. We cut back to the interior. We pan back to the women. They begin to respond. First one. Then another. Then a wave sweeps over all of them.
The camera sweeps over and across the interior of the church as the narrator explains--
Like a spark that sets fire to the dry grass, Rosa and her companions' tears spread through the crowd in an instant. Men, women, the elderly, young men in new smocks--everyone was soon sobbing. Something superhuman seemed to hover above their heads, an all-pervading spirit, the powerful breath of an invisible, all-powerful being.
The narrator stops. The camera continues. The music continues. The congregants allow the Spirit to move upon them.
Joseph sees Maria and moves to her. They are kneeling on the kneeling railing. He wants to say something. Tries to.
The priest approaches the pulpit. Steps up into it. Begins the sermon with gratitude and joy.
We move on.
The entire scene takes up between three and four minutes of screen time. And is hidden inside a light comedic film. When you finish the film, you might even forget this scene. When you think of Ophuls, you might not list this film as a first example of his filmmaking. It contains the production design and camera daring of yesterday's film La Ronde, but it cannot keep up in theme or narrative structure. It wanders.
But in this moment he has accomplished something. It is significant. And for that we say, Thank you.
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