Filmmaker Max Ophuls
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Max Ophuls was a filmmaker who achieved renown in his native Germany, adapted to the different film industry in America and produced a number of important works, and returned to Europe in the 1950s to direct some of his finest works in France. From the latter era, Ophuls directed Le Plaisir in 1952 from stories by Guy de Maupassant. The film differs from other Ophuls works in that it is essentially a trilogy with a narrator in the form of the author, Maupassant, who connects the three stories and whose presence in the film emphasizes the element of narration and storytelling. At the same time, Ophuls makes these stories his own, finding in them reflections of themes evident in his other works, themes such as the chasm between desire and fulfillment, the ongoing search for value, the tyranny of time, and the sheer value of storytelling itself. The three stories are unrelated in Maupassant except that they have the same author. In the film, all three are related to the central idea of the title, pleasure, seen here in three distinct forms and explained by the narrator as Pleasure and Love, Pleasure and Purity, and Pleasure and Death. the idea of pleasure is not isolated in any of the stories or in the film as a whole, for it interacts with the other issues noted above, with questions of love and death, with concerns about time, with a desire for value and meaning. Storytelling for Ophuls becomes the means for exploring these life issues and for demonstrating how specifi
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mask and the face, on-stage and back-stage (the opening of Liebelei also balances the audience and the backstage life of the opera). The dance can be associated both with life and death, with the idea of life as a dance and with the idea of the dance of death. The dance hall is a place for casual sexual encounters, and the dance thus has a number of meanings, some in opposition to others. Ophuls often creates such layers of complexity and contradictory meanings, seeing life as made up of such a mixture. Women in the story are seen as objects of desire, pursued by the males who come to the dance hall precisely for that reason. The wife in the story achieves a dignity that is denied the other women, and in part this derives from the fact that she is herself a storyteller, explaining her situation and her husband's story to the doctor. She is thus related to the Maupassant voice and to the ringmaster of Lola Montes and the storyteller in La Ronde. The sexual interplay of this story relates to those films and to Liebelei, while the odd and imprisoning relationship between the wife and her husband in "The Mask" recalls elements of the secret and confining life created by the letter-writer in Letter from an Unknown Woman.
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Approximate Word count = 1718
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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