Wordiezett So much average

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Teyss At one point, André tells Louise about their couple: "It is only superficially that it is superficial." The same could be said about the movie. Initially, it is essentially seducing, glittering with stylish settings, elegant images, finely crafted dialogues and charming characters. It feels like a precise mechanism, paced by the movement of the earrings going from one hand to another, regularly coming back to the same persons (Louise possesses them four times, André and the jeweller each three times and Fabrizio twice). There is something comical about this movement, notably when André bewilderedly discovers them the second time.But progressively, the smooth surface cracks open, revealing an outbreak of passions and eventually tragedy. Frequent mirrors already indicate we are seeing an artificial environment that is about to give way.*** WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS ***Louise falls madly in love then becomes gravely ill, André loses control, Fabrizio switches from love to disdain, there is a duel. The futile movement of the earrings becomes increasingly dramatic: Louise sadly gives them to her niece; they trigger the separation between Louise and Fabrizio; she ruins herself to buy them back; she donates them to a church to avoid a disaster, that seems inevitable anyhow. These earrings are more than a McGuffin opening and closing the movie: they illustrate its evolution from a bright to a dark tone.We build up certitudes during the first part of the movie, and they slowly fall apart.Louise first appears as a lovely, mundane, frivolous, deceitful lady, only absorbed in fancy clothing, jewellery, parties and dances. Yet we start feeling sorry for her because she is suffocating in her couple: symbolically, all scenes with her husband occur inside, while in exterior scenes she is alone or with Fabrizio. We then understand she is capable of boundless love: she becomes ill when she realises Fabrizio is turning away from her, she humbles herself in front of him. In a compelling shot, contrasting with her previous gorgeous images, she appears before him exhausted, in plain clothing, without jewels.André first does not seem to love Louise deeply: he is chiefly preoccupied by social conventions and appearances. However he finally admits he did everything for her: "To please you, I forced myself to play a role I do not like." He is hurt when he sees her devastated by love: he loses his temper and provokes a duel that will make him either a criminal or a dead man. This apparently dominating and arrogant character is actually touching.Fabrizio first looks like a superficial Italian seducer, only attracted by Louise's looks. Yet he genuinely gets to love her. He is hurt when he understands she lies to him. His resulting disappointment and sorrow are so intense he is willing to die: when André asks for a duel, he is not surprised or frightened. He calmly refuses to apologise, knowing he will probably be killed since André is more experienced.Aesthetically, form evolves to reflect the downfall of the atmosphere and the characters. At the beginning, the movie is poised, with slow, long, fluid shots. Towards the end, the rhythm accelerates: shots are shorter, they lose control for instance by showing Louise in church with an inclined image. Then the movie ends brutally, without revealing the outcome of the duel (Fabrizio could just be wounded) and Louise's probable death (which is not certain). After an abrupt ellipse, it confusingly closes on a shot of the earrings in the empty church. The precise mechanism has jammed.To emphasise the contrast between the first and the last part of the movie, Ophüls associates events that occur once in a light mode, once in a dark mode: the seeds of tragedy are sown from the start. A few examples, on top of the earrings mentioned above:At the beginning, Louise prays in church for a futile motive (she wants the jeweller to accept the earrings). At the end, she prays again in church for a more dramatic reason: she wants Fabrizio to survive the duel.At the opera, a friend tells André someone demands an apology because he stared at his wife: potentially this could turn into a duel, but André wittingly avoids the trap. At the end, André calls for a duel with Fabrizio precisely because he seduced his wife (although the official reason is different) and precisely asks the same friend to be his witness.At the dinner, Louise and Fabrizio sitting next to each other speak two different languages to other persons. This announces their future misunderstandings. During the hunt, Louise faints when she sees Fabrizio falling off his horse. Nothing serious: Fabrizio is safe and André jokes about his wife's ability to faint. At the end, Louise collapses again, but it is much more dramatic: Fabrizio was possibly killed, and she will probably die.At the club, André and Fabrizio argue politely while two swordsmen practice in the background. No harm done, yet these two fake duels announce the real one at the end.Louise repeats to Fabrizio "I don't love you", to express the opposite. This announces their future separation.Fundamentally, "Madame de…" is a tragic story about relationships destroyed by miscommunication: Louise and André could have been happy if each had not played a role drifting them apart; Louise's and Fabrizio's passion could have lasted if she had been sincere to him and to herself. The tragedy is all the more gripping as the movie starts in a light, delightful mode.A last note: the movie is based on the short novel by Louise de Vilmorin written two years earlier. The movie roughly follows the same plot, also ending with Louise's death, although it sometimes diverges: notably, there is no duel in the novel. Regardless, the movie gives an altogether superior dimension to the story by magnificently illustrating the dramatic evolution.

clanciai The two top gallant gentlemen of the cinema as rivals of its most beautiful woman, both loving her beyond expression in the subtlest possible intrigue of fate as unpredictable as an improvised thriller in which the writer himself has no idea of where the mechanics of destiny will lead him or the puppets of his tale, a labyrinth of love leading everywhere but out of it, filmed with all the refined expertise of perhaps the greatest film director of all, using his constantly moving camera for an overwhelming constant flood of beauty and poetry. This is simply incredible. You can see every film of his again and again forever, since their richness of details and amounting complications of human feelings always expressed by hints and understatements are unfathomably without end. Danielle Darrieux. great already in the 30s and chosen by most cinema lovers as the one outstanding film queen of beauty, is 99 today (1st of May 2016), while her warm beauty dominates her every film forever. Charles Boyer is always reliably excellent and here nobler than ever as the husband, while Vittorio de Sica perhaps makes his most sincere performance as the passionate lover, just as honestly romantic as Charles Boyer's absolute nobility couldn't be more convincing. What about the story, then, actually seemingly superficially a trifle of unavoidable complications resulting from white lies, but the miracle is how this mere miniature of an episodic detail is aggrandized into a love drama of more than epic proportions involving all kinds of storms of a thrilling melodrama. Comedy or tragedy? No, just a human documentary charting an ocean of the complications of being just human. To this comes Oscar Straus' delightful music adorning the masterpiece with a golden frame of tenderness, as if the composer adored the poor victims of this train of complications resulting from the mere trifle of a white lie. Is anyone committing any mistake at all to deserve all this agony of unnecessary self-torture resulting from mere complexes of feelings? No, in all this towering guilt no one is to blame for anything. They are all as innocent as children getting mixed up in a game that goes beyond them. Maybe the tragedy could have been avoided, but then the French are as they are with a penchant for an irrevocably undeniable mentality of Crime Passionnel. There Max Ophuls finds a dead end of his story and film, which perhaps was necessary, or else a story like this could never have ended. In fact, there was a continuation, but Ophuls cut it out, forcing himself to avoid overdoing it. The masterpiece just couldn't be driven further.Still, it's not his best film. But it's a perfect example of the virtuosity of his art.

GManfred "The Earrings Of Madame de..." is an homage to the rich in fin de siecle France, with the accompanying elegance and opulence front and center. The lush set pieces could have received an Oscar nom on their own, as could Ophuls' celebrated camera work. It is a clever and absorbing love story, the overall effect of which is of a world trivialized and complicated by excessive wealth and by a very common ethical sense.Madame is 'idle rich', and has run up some undisclosed debts and sells her earrings, a wedding gift from her husband and which she deems unattractive and therefore disposable. She pretends they are stolen but the jeweler brings them back to her husband, who buys them back and gives them to his mistress. They eventually end up in Constantinople, purchased by a Count who, enchanted at first sight by Madame, gives them to her as a gift. From here on matters take some predictable turns. The story is quite good and avoids tedium by virtue of the competence of the actors and by Ophuls' camera. I enjoyed the lush sets and the overall deliberate pace, which was made quicker by his camera movement. It is the kind of picture which lingers in the mind long after it is over. It is not available in any format and was shown at MOMA, NYC in 35mm.

WinterMaiden There is little of praise I can add to what others have said. I would like to address the comments of those who don't like the film because they find Louise unworthy of their admiration or sympathy. (There are two threads on the board that raise the same objection, and one quotes a review that calls her a "dick.")Do you feel sympathy for Humbert Humbert? Or for Emma Bovary? Or for Anna Karenina? Or for the Vicomte de Valmont? People are certainly free not to like the directing style of Max Ophuls or the performance styles of his actors. But in the negative reactions to this film, and especially to the character of Louise, I detect a strong whiff of anachronistic response, and an inability to see the film in the context of its time and place, not to mention the characters in the context of their society. It also seems to me that many people have a sort of high school notion that you have to find a character admirable in order to feel sorry for her. Or, for that matter, that you have to feel sympathy for a character in order to be moved by her story.The irony of "Madame de. . ." is that it turns out that the character with the deepest and most constant emotions is the General, who has concealed the depth of his feelings for Louise because it is not the fashion to be in love with one's own wife. He follows the rules; he has mistresses; he doesn't mind Louise's lovers too much as long she too follows the rules. He can't handle it when she strays outside the lines, and it is HIS behavior, not hers, that finally ruins them all.The art of "Madame de..." is that the lush setting and sense of a society that lives on ersatz emotion prepares us to be caught up in the ecstasy of Louise's immolation as the emotions become real. That doesn't mean that the Baron is really the Romeo to her Juliet, or that (artistically speaking) he needs to be. In her review of "The Story of Adèle H.," Pauline Kael comments on what a pathetically inadequate object of obsession Lt. Pinson constitutes. Indeed, late in the film, when Adèle passes him on the street, she doesn't even notice him. The Baron is also a rather bland love object, and it is true that we have little sense of how far their affair has progressed, or if he would even want Louise to leave her husband for him. (That is not, after all, how the game is played.) In the Garbo "Camille," Robert Taylor's Armand is utterly unworthy of her, and I've never seen a version of "Anna Karenina" where the Vronsky seemed worth ruining oneself over--or who, for that matter, really seemed to WANT Anna to leave her husband for him.Louise's tragedy is that her understanding of the game, of which she is a typically petty and only somewhat skilled player (she has, after all, already skirted the edge of ruin by falling deeply into debt), does not prepare her for actual love. Once there she tries to behave well, but events spiral out of the control of all the characters once they are outside of the predictable game. We don't even have to see a redemption in the completeness with which she gives herself up to her love, or her making herself ill over it; her behavior is by and large selfish and unconcerned with the feelings of anyone other than herself. If not a redemption she does have a kind of saving grace: she doesn't ask for pity or understanding (although she does ask for forgiveness), and she does achieve a kind of understanding of herself when she admits near the end that she is hopelessly vain. What makes "Madame de. . ." a great film, though, is how we see the General, Louise, and even the bland Baron become human as they step outside the rules of the game, and the way in which the art of Ophuls prepares us for the exaltation of Louise's destruction. You don't have to pity her to be moved by the emotion of it. You may even find a dreadful comedy in it, as one does with Humbert. Humbert knows how unworthy he is as a figure of tragedy; Valmont realizes with a bitter sense of irony that he has destroyed himself with his own clever pettiness. Louise lacks those levels of insight, as well as their degree of villainy, but her lack of credentials to be a great heroine is itself moving. At the end, when she finally destroys herself, it seems to be, at last, in her first more-or-less-selfless gesture-- ambiguous, though, as everything in Ophuls is. Perhaps Renoir (the allusion to him above being deliberate) could have made these characters more sympathetic, or made us feel more tenderness for unsympathetic characters. (Renoir could make us feel tenderness for a rock.) But Ophuls is not as purely focused on the human heart as Renoir; he always sees the absurd social animal, as well. I think it is more appropriate with Ophuls to have that distancing, as we have when we read "Madame Bovary."