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Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952)
🕑 Added 2021-01-28 20:13:14 +0000 UTC
Prior to watching Le Plaisir, all I really knew about it was that it supplied the final shot of Godard's The Image Book. At the end of the film, Godard shows us a masked man in a top hat, quadrilling himself half to death in a ballroom. Of course now, having seen Ophüls' film, Godard's use of the image has a different resonance. In the opening segment, "Le Masque," we discover Ambroise (Jean Galland), an elderly man who was once a bon vivant and a playboy. He wears the mask in order to disguise his age and still experience the thrill of young women's attention. Alas, though the will is strong, the body is weak. Ophüls plays this for bitter comedy, and Godard extends that tone in concluding The Image Book. Godard is the old man, always chasing his earlier successes, but also refusing to sit back and let the younger generations take his place. As an artist, he will "dance" unto death,
Since I didn't know much about Le Plaisir, I was surprised, and a bit disappointed, to discover that it's essentially an anthology film. Composed of three short films all based on works by Guy de Maupassant, Le Plaisir makes the case for itself that it is depicting three distinct relationships to pleasure. While the long middle section is most direct in its engagement with this theme -- "Le Maison Tellier" focuses on the men and women who circulate through a brothel -- the other two are more like mirror images of one another. In the first, an old man tries to be young again, while in the third, we witness a young man becoming old, or at least broken.
Ophüls is doing something unusual here in regard to literary adaptation. All three parts of Le Plaisir heavily feature narration ostensibly coming from Maupassant himself. (Jean Servais delivers the narration as Maupassant.) Ophüls thereby generates an odd tension between the literary commentary we're hearing and the things we are seeing in his film. In some respects, Maupassant tells us things we cannot know from the film alone, such as the color of a salesman's garter belts. At this time, literature can evoke color much more than cinema can.
But really, the most complicated aspect of the film comes in its treatment of point of view. As the narration, Maupassant-the-character operates a bit like a benshi, directing our attention to aspects of the film we might not otherwise observe. This is most evident in the "Maison Tellier" section, where shots of the main characters in the landscape are described for us in terms of atmosphere, the quality of sunlight, or the gradual building of spiritual emotion. The cinema, as such, cannot really describe. It shows. But the combination of Ophüls's film with Maupassant's literary descriptions produces an effect of free indirect discourse. We are watching event unfold through the author's perspective, and this places an added distance between us the the scenarios unfolding.
These questions of shifting point of view are most fully realized in "Maison Tellier." The segment introduces the brothel, and then, when the house in unexpectedly closed, Ophüls asks us to spend time with the forlorn men who are left wandering in the night. Once they realize that the women are only gone for a day trip to the country, the segment shifts to the women's experience, showing us their train journey and the various reactions they elicit from other passengers and, later, the community around Mlle Tellier's brother (Jean Gabin), who see the sex workers as fancy ladies from the city. Ophüls and Maupassant, with their usual sophistication, examine the brothel as a social space, one that brings together various intersecting subject positions and experiences.
Unfortunately this complexity doesn't really carry over into the final segment. Granted, the movement of Maupassant's narration into the diegetic space is an oddly compelling decision. "Le Modèle" is bookended by commentary from the main character's friend (also played by Servais), who is both a character and an externalized third-person observer. But within this framework, Ophüls mostly concerns himself with the viewpoint of the painter Jean (Daniel Gélin), and doesn't give us much of a sense of who his wife (Simone Simon) actually is. Granted, this externalization is probably in keeping with Joséphine's role as a model, and Jean's rather superficial appreciation of her.
But compared with the complicated gender dynamics of "Maison Tellier," or even the rueful portrait of damaged vanity we see in "Le Masque," Le Plaisir's concluding chapter is an anticlimax. Personally, I would have reversed the order of the segments, but then again, the decline and fall of that sequence would have been so "perfect" that it wouldn't provide these conundrums to chew on.
