Madame de…
After 10 days of Berlinale and the wonderful “Dodes’kaden”, I am recently feeling like watching meaningful films. Normally it’s the other way around, which is also why it took me so long to watch the movies on the Monolith, which, incidentally is not even my main harddrive anymore. After this film, there are only four left (“Life and nothing more”, “The River”, “Inland Empire” and “Satantango”).
This is my third Ophüls after “Lola Montès” and “Letter from an Unknown Woman”, and it is a little ironic that I still haven’t gotten around to see his Schnitzler adaptations. I doubt those will be as beautiful as his later films, especially “Madame de…” which is an almost Sofia-Coppola-like display of luxurious lives full of emptiness (ahh what a terrible pun). I thought that “Madame de…” is actually even more beautiful than “Lola Montès”. I thought the sets were ravishing and – oh I am saying this a little too often – but I want to live in the movie. I am totally aware that the film is a perfect example of how wealth and free time do not usually come with happiness, but that doesn’t keep me up from desiring it when Ophüls’s direction displays it so beautifully.
On an emotional level, I think the famous dance collage scene did its job really amazingly well. I could feel how their love was growing with every single turn and every single cut, and when she said “Je ne vous aime pas” for the first time, it was obviously the moment she actually falls in love. There is something very simplistic about the affair in this film, yet this iconic “Je ne vous aime pas” repeated over and over makes it awfully touching (at least it did for me). The film is a little bit of a more modern Madame Bovary, and I wish Flaubert’s novel got an amazing adaptation like this.
I am really curious about what Ophüls did with “Reigen” and “Liebelei”, heck I even want to re-read those two. One day, one day…