Madame de

Max Ophuls 1953 Madame de- seems to be the masterpiece of the director's late period. It is an ornate, glittering melodrama, a tour de force of style, sufficiently mysterious and ambiguous to simulate dilemmas of the heart in the real world -- and, yet, I find it rather cold and remote. This is a characteristic of all great works, however -- at first, there is a tincture of the repellent in them. Ophuls using his trademark, an elaborately moving camera, to simultaneously signify entrapment and liberation. He grasps that a camera moving to track characters may result in tedium unless the view of the principals is, sometimes, elaborately obscured and occluded -- his couples walk through rococo palaces swarming with servants and musicians, through architectures blocked by filigree partitions, thick walls, fantastic billowing wall-hangings only to emerge among fifty couples, but isolated by the lens, and, therefore, free on the screen. The sense embodied in these tracking shots is one of confinement of the most elaborate, dense, and imponderable sort -- there is literally always too much to see and grasp -- then, bursting into freedom. Ophuls freedom is a whirling motion of his characters, a kind of spinning around an axis of mutual desire -- that is elaborate and complex motion that goes nowhere, stillness within continuous motion. The stasis induced in the picture is, in part, a function of the imprisoning, suffocating decor and, yet, also embodied in the fantastically intricate structure of the film: wheels within wheels, intricate cross-referencing and repetitions (each scene is repeated, at least, twice with completely different emotional valence). Within his system of film syntax, Ophuls is capable of great, wrenching effects -- a final tracking motion in a church slams, it seems, into an incommunicative pillar, a gesture of obstruction that signifies the death of, at least, one of his characters. Danielle Darrieux, Vittorio de Sica, and Charles Boyer enact the love triangle with the requisite Continental aplomb and dignity -- the most intense love scenes are staged without the characters touching one another. The commentary on the film's Criterion edition is almost comically scholarly -- two lady-professors learnedly discussing Freud's theory of the fetish and the patriarchal gaze. That said, the commentary is highly intelligent and useful in demonstrating -- to use academic jargon -- how intensely "gendered" interpretation of this film will be -- men and women will invariably interpret this picture in completely different terms. What our docents see in the picture is indisputably present and intelligently observed by them -- but it is not what any man would see in the picture. In fact, I wonder if this movie represents the "woman's picture" -- that is, melodramas directed to a female audience in the era between between the 30's and 1960, let's say -- at it's exact limit: this is a picture that yields, I think, radically different interpretive understanding in men and women, while seducing both genders with its elaborate and scintillating surface textures. A "woman's picture", I will venture, is a movie that men and women necessarily read in very different ways. To a man, Madame de-- represents the story of two affable, noble men destroyed by the connivance of a fascinating, charming, and brilliantly deceptive woman; women seem to see the movie as a brilliant woman's battle against domination by two powerful men. Both readings are palpably and literally correct but they are formally incommensurate. As Charles Boyer says, in one of the film's indelibly chilly bedroom scenes, "we are only superficially superficial."