Madame de -- (The Earrings of Madame de -- )

Madame de –





Madame de – (1953) or as it was called in United States, The Earrings of Madame de – , was directed by Max Ophuls. The film stars Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio deSica, a powerhouse trio of performers in the early fifties. Madame de – is considered by many the most successful of Ophuls’ films and the best example of his unique directorial style. The film is based on a 1951 novel that was a bestseller in France and the picture was successful at the box-office.

Max Ophuls was born in 1902 in Saarbruecken, Germany as Maxmillian Oppenheimer. Ophuls father was a successful Jewish factory owner, a leader in the garment industry. To avoid embarrassing his conventional bourgeois father, the director disguised his name when he went to Aachen to study theater.

Like most successful theater folks in Germany, Ophuls ended-up in Vienna where he worked at the famous Burgtheater. He directed, designed sets, and labored as a dramaturge. A prodigy, he was appointed director when only 24 and directed over 200 productions at the theater. In 1929, he began directing films in Berlin. His most successful German film is Liebelei (1933) based on material by the Viennese writer, Arthur Schnitzler. Hitler’s rise to power forced Ophuls into exile. He moved to Paris and worked in the French film industry. Again, he was required to flee – in 1940 he moved to Hollywood. Studio producers in Los Angeles were uncomfortable with Ophuls’ elaborate camera-style and he was fired by Howard Hughes from his first job. But he made several notable films in Hollywood including Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) based on a Stefan Zweig novella, and Caught (1949), a film noir with Robert Ryan. In 1950, he returned to France and made a number of well-regarded pictures including Madame de- and Le Plaisir. His most elaborate French film is the spectacular, but flawed, Lola Montez (1955) with Peter Ustinov and Carole Martine. This film was a critical failure and Ophuls was derided for its excesses. (As early as 1960, the film had been re-evaluated and is now regarded as a masterpiece, albeit one with peculiar and disturbing features.) Ophuls died in 1958 of rheumatic heart disease while directing interiors for a film about Amedeo Modigliano, The Lovers of Montparnasse – Jacques Becker completed the picture.

Ophuls is thought of as a director of "women’s films." Sometimes, he is called a "feminist director." His movies were consistently undervalued because they are melodramas, generally movies about passionate women who live (and die) for love. Many of the pictures combine melodrama with period or costume drama – the films have something of the quality of hyper-sophisticated "bodice-rippers," and, therefore, belong to a slighlty disreputable genre. In each generation, critics, particularly feminist ones, attend Ophuls films anticipating that they will find the picture politically incorrect, retrograde and dated. And, in each generation, the movies end up winning over most of their viewers – the pictures are brilliantly cast and acted, beautifully designed, and highly sophisticated.

　

　


Style


A shot that does not call for tracks

Is agony for poor old Max,

Who, when separated from his dolly

Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.

Once when they took away his crane,

I thought that he would never smile again.
James Mason

Perhaps, the second or third shot of Madame de – shows the title character leaving her boudoir and descending an elaborate marble stairway. The stairs are grandiose and the walls framing them are elaborate with draperies, stone scrolls, doorways with classical pediments and other ornamentation. Our first impression is size, opulence, a profusion of space quite unnecessary to the simple action depicted – a woman descending stairs, that is, a mere transition from one place to another. The heroine enters the shot above the camera on the right side of the frame, passes along a stone balustrade, and, then, hurries down the steps moving toward a landing at the frame’s left edge. (The frame’s edge is continuously fluid – the camera tracks with the heroine who appears in a long-shot toward the left.) We expect Madame de – to reach the landing, reverse her direction and, then, continue her descent back to the right and the base of the steps. As the camera moves with the actress, a candelabra swims across the image in the foreground and there are other objects in the picture plane only a few feet from the lens. The effect is paradoxical – the camera is sweeping across a grand, operatic space, but from a vantage that occludes and congests the foreground: we have both a sense of expansiveness and confinement at the same time. As Madame de – reaches the landing, she does something unanticipated: rather than continue her descent, she, suddenly, moves up from the landing continuing to the left. A woman off-screen has spoken to her from that edge of the frame and she darts up the steps, or, at least, three or four of them, to encounter that person – it is "Nanny," the heroine’s loyal personal servant. Nanny tells Madame de – that she should have breakfast. The heroine reverses her direction again, returns to the landing, and, then, continues downward, traversing the steps and moving back to the right to reach the ground level. We expect the shot will end – the action of descending the steps is complete. But, in fact, Ophuls has more surprises for us.

I will pause for a moment to consider the little hiatus in Madame de –‘s descent of the stairs – the moment when she suddenly moves more to the left, for an instant, climbing steps that we interpret as leading back to another upper hallway flanking the steps off-screen to the left. The interruption in Madame de – ‘s progress to the ground floor of her palace is characteristic to this film’s remarkable style and Ophuls aesthetic in general. First, the heroine’s sudden detour from the direction that we expect her to be going registers as a faint, but distinct and indelible surprise. We don’t expect the set to extend to the left beyond the scope of the steps needed for the heroine’s descent from her boudoir. Accordingly, we are surprised that there is more to the set, additional space that can be entered and articulated for narrative purposes off-sceen. Ophuls’ staging activates off-screen space – we are cued to sense that the space traversed by his characters extends indefinitely in all directions and that the characters can enter that space. In other words, they seem somehow free to change their direction. Second, the little detour seems pointless – why interrupt an image that seems intended to dramatize the heroine’s grandiose surroundings and demonstrate her beauty and grace (and the beauty of her garments) as she descends the steps? But, in fact, as the film proceeds, we learn that Madame de-‘s loyal "Nanny" is an important character in the movie – in fact, she has an unforgettable scene in the heroine’s boudoir near the end of the film and actually attends upon the character’s death. "Nanny’s" loyalty to the selfish and vain Madame de– is significant to the film and acts to humanize, and make more sympathetic, the vain and destructive heroine. Accordingly, Ophuls decision to include her in the second or third shot, if only for an instant, is motivated by Nanny’s importance in the film. What seems to be a strangely arbitrary interruption in the heroine’s progress descending the steps, in fact, has narrative significance. The faint irritation that we sense at this apparently pointless divagation, in fact, embeds the incident in our mind – before we know why, the character of "Nanny" has been rendered memorable.

Ophuls described the hallmarks of his mature style as "mobility and surprise." And we can see these elements dramatized as the shot continues. We expect the tracking shot to conclude when the action depicted reaches its natural end – that is, when Madame de- has completed her descent of the stairs. But obedient to Nanny’s admonition, Madame de – moves farther to the right, passing through a double French door, changing her direction again and, then, moving back to the left, viewed this time through an opening that is also slatted with window frames. The effect is vertiginous – how big is this palace? How many rooms does Madame de– have to cross to get to the door to the outside? Where is the outside? There seem to be rooms nestled within rooms, walls penetrated by arcade-like openings or rectangular doorways apparently closed with glass but translucent, the plane of the glass panes defined by complicated mullions. There is a narrative purpose for this complicated transit – the heroine arrives in a room where she takes a hurried sip of coffee under a large and formidable-looking picture of her formidable husband, the General (Charles Boyer). She makes some comments about concealing the errand that she is about to accomplish – that is, going to a jeweler, whose store and office space is similarly baroque (two levels connected by a winding spiral stair) to sell the earrings that her husband gave her on their wedding day.

Ophuls style is unlike any other film maker. (Josef von Sternberg is the only director that I know who does anything comparable.) Generally, films are designed to accommodate the narrative depicted in the scenario. In Ophuls, an argument can be made that the narrative is shaped to accommodate the director’s lavish and intricate sets. We know that Ophuls’ worked closely with his set decorator d’Eaubonne to design exceptionally complex sets. These sets were conceived in the round – that is, as space articulated in all directions. Most film sets are tableaux or diorama-like – they are boxes into which we peer. D’Eaubonne’s sets have four sides to them and, frequently open into other four-sided spaces. These spaces are described by some critics not as sets but as "complexes" – that is, interconnected spaces that can be entered from all sides and that are configured to articulate various pictorial planes: the sets have objects located in them to define corridors of motion. Characters always move through these spaces in front of something and with something, in turn, in front of them. Again, Ophul’s signature effect is that of a space that is simultaneously expansive and far larger than it needs to be, while, at the same time, much more congested and confining than we might otherwise expect. The sets are decentered – they don’t have simple focal points and are oddly realistic in that they don’t necessarily presuppose a preferred perspective or vantage. The sets can be accessed from a variety of directions and offer many different pathways through which they can be traversed.

D’Eaubonne worked closely with the director to design the sets and their accoutrements. The lavish sets were, then, built "in the round" – that is with four walls confining the spaces, but "fly" walls that could be moved to accommodate camera placement and the installation of tracks to implement Ophuls famous moving camera. The actors were rehearsed in the set with Ophuls following them with a viewfinder. Ultimately, the director determined the location of the camera and defined the pathway that the actors would take through the labyrinthine set. Once the pathway was designated, Ophuls set up foreground objects to establish a picture plane in front of his characters, adjusted walls and lighting for the shot, and, then, made the take. The space in which the shot was staged and the character’s motion through that space controls the narrative. The audience has a sense that the set and the alternative methods of transit through that space destine the narrative, that is, frame the narrative in a certain. For Ophuls, sets and the pictorial space encompassed by his moving frame is destiny. This gives his films their sense of freedom –there are many ways to traverse the space and it extends in all directions off-screen – as well as confinement: everything is mapped-out, written, decreed, in advance.

The spatial phenomenology in Ophuls’ films energizes off-screen space: what we see is elaborate, what we infer on both sides of the frame is equally complex and elaborate. Space is simultaneously congested and gratuitously expansive – Ophuls’ sets are always far more vast and elaborate than required by the narrative, which is sometimes rather banal and trite. (Do we really need an acre of simulated marble, chandeliers, balustrades, candelabra, in the foreground, enclosed glass nooks and secondary planes of action merely for an actress to descend some stairs from her bedroom?) Madame de– is often thought to be the most fully realized and effectively staged of Ophuls’ films. This is because the plot has the same characteristics as the staging in Ophuls’ elaborate "set-complexes." Everything in the film revolves around a pair of diamond earrings. The action of the movie spans the world and all its places – there are train stations, elaborate soirees in private homes, an opera-house, various palaces, a cathedral and military installations, and, at one point, the action movies to Constantinople; the climax is brilliantly staged plein-aire. Yet, all of this motion circles around the earrings to which the film continuously reverts.

　


Criticism

Ophuls films revel in circles. His narratives trace spirals. In La Ronde, ten separate sexual encounters begin with a prostitute instituting a daisy-chain that reaches the imperial bedchambers and that, finally, ends with the same street-walker one-hundred minutes later. Ophuls’ first mature work, Liebelei, similarly describes a circular pattern of seduction, abandonment, and, further seduction – a roundelay or waltz that revolves around a fixed point. Some critics regard Ophuls as configuring The Earrings of Madame de... (or simply Madame de... as the film is known in Europe) to summarize all the principal themes concerning the director throughout his career. In a sense, The Earrings of Madame de...seems to trace a circuit back from Ophuls American films, including uncharacteristically a Hollywood film noir, to the director’s origins in the cynical, but, nonetheless, glamorous Viennese theater. (In Vienna, Ophuls was renowned for his sensitivity to Mozart – in many ways, The Earrings of Madame de...seems a commentary on Mozart’s operas, including, of course, the composer’s harshest and least romantic work, Cosi Fan Tutti.) The spiral vortex of plot in The Earrings creates a force-field spinning the action around the fetishized jewelry, embodying space as a series of interlocking circles, engendering 360 degree tracking motions of the camera, and, at last, effecting a ricorso of themes that obsessed Ophuls throughout his career.

Andrew Sarris, an influential critic at the Village Voice for several decades, regards Max Ophuls as the greatest of all film makers and he has praised Madame de... as Ophuls finest film. Sarris says that the movie is "without a misstep, entirely perfect." Dave Kehr, another well-known critic, has written that Madame de... "is the most beautiful thing ever made by human hands..." Curiously, the movie was successful at the box office in Europe but disregarded as trivial and disappointing by the critics. (I suspect that the film’s lack of initial recognition has something to do with the status of its principal players as ubiquitous international stars: critics expected Charles Boyer to be type-cast in the kind of role that her performs in this film and Vittoria deSica had starred in over a hundred movies, mostly playing romantic and seductive leading men; Danielle Darieux was a matinee idol as well – critics often resist films that feature leading movie stars playing parts that are broadly consistent with audience expectations. It’s for this reason that the artistry of John Wayne was denigrated for so m any years.)

Feminist critics have championed the film in recent years. These critics perceive the heroine as the victim of a patriarchal system embodied by two male archetypes: the soldier with his stiff phallic bearing and the weak, passive seducer acted by deSica. Madame de...’s initial plight, the fact that she has to raise 20,000 francs to pay her debts, suggests that, despite her social status, she really owns nothing, controls no wealth, and has no economic agency. Feminists argue that the film dramatizes the fact that Madame de... is male property and that she is not allowed to own anything or retain any objects of value; since she is property herself, everything that she owns, including the earrings, is owned by her husband. More sophisticated feminists suggest that the male characters are just as trapped within their social order as the female protagonist and that no one has any real freedom or liberty – this confinement materialized in the camera that obsessively circles the characters, by the congested foregrounds and the repeated imagery of barriers, barricades, doors, and thresholds. (Three times, we see soldiers at the checkpoint with its barrier to the military base; the ushers in the opera repeatedly open and close doors; Lola is seen through an imprisoning grill when she sells the earrings in Constantinople). Madame de...’s single gesture of revolt against this social order destroys her. Initially, she misunderstands that the earrings fetishize her virginity and her marriage contract – her older husband bestowed them upon her after their wedding night – and that these objects are more than a mere commodity. Ironically, when the earrings are given to her by deSica’s character, she, then, fetishizes those jewels as well, imputing to them a value that transcends their exchange value as a commodity. Madame de... first undervalues the earrings, putting herself at risk and triggering the succession of events that disrupt her already fragile marriage. Then, she overvalues the earrings, inventing lies so that she can wear the jewels publicly, a ruse that results in her death and the death of her lover.

Critics observe that in the Belle Epoche upper class world shown in the film, adultery is authorized so long as it is committed without love or affection. Feminist writers differ radically as to how much sex is encoded in the movie: some writers believe the film to be completely asexual – all libido transferred to the fetish-object of the earrings. Other writers argue that the movie is crammed with sex, implied but never shown. A test-case is the scene in the bedroom in which the general asserts that he will win back his wife’s affections: "of course, he makes love to her," although off-sceen between shots, some feminists argue. Others go so far as to assert that the general is impotent, incapable of the act of love.

Feminists, and, indeed, critics of all orientations, also quarrel about Madame de...’s character. Ophuls remarked to his set decorator that he regarded Madame de... (a woman without a name) as a "complete void". He said that she is frivolous to the point of non-existence, destructive, and childish. (Madame de..., herself, at one point declares that she is incapable of "reason.") But this reading is hard to sustain, particularly in light of Danielle Darieux’s remarkable performance. And most writers disagree with Ophuls own assessment of his title character.

One vehement critic of the film was Louise de Vilmorin, the author of the novella on which the movie is based. Vilmorin’s story does not take place at the turn of the 20^th century – the period of the action is not specified. In the novella, Madame de... is not married to a military man but seems to be a member of the haute bourgeois. The novella does not end with a duel. Rather, Madame de... dies from a broken heart, destroyed by the cruelty of both men, and her suitors, husband and lover, each retain one earring as souvenir of their relationship. Vilmorin thought that Ophuls had ruined her novel and disavowed the film adaptation.