The Earrings of Madam de...
Madame (Danielle Darrieux, in a part written for her) and the General (Charles Boyer) are engaged in a corporate marriage. Their raw material is money (secondarily charm), which they convert into respectability. Excess respectability can in turn be used to purchase a degree of personal freedom, which for the General means affairs and a peremptory manner, and for Madame means flirtations – and so we can see from this that they are not equal shareholders. The action of the film – and this is a film all about action and reaction, it is essentially a yo-yo – the action of the film begins when Madame creates an overdraft in the marriage’s finances. She has incurred debts, and to repay them she sells a pair of diamond earrings that were a wedding gift from the general. Later on she will make a graver mistake; she will begin an affair. There is not enough respectability in the bank to cover such an expenditure, and the General is dismayed by her lack of prudent management. To rectify the situation he kills her lover. In protest, she resigns, i.e. dies of a broken heart.
The Earrings of Madame de… is an extremely clean movie, vigorously flossed. It begins, proceeds, and ends in media res. Director Max Ophüls had gone overbudget on his last film, La Ronde, and his reaction seems to have been to turn this one into a model of efficiency. Both are in a sense “trick” movies. La Ronde follows a daisy chain of sexual encounters, while The Earrings follows said titular earrings as they make their way from Pairs to Constantinople and back again, looping in and out of Madame’s hands and picking up a head of metaphorical steam as they go. When they finally come to rest (on display in a church, quivering with candlelight) the movie ends. This is all a fulcrum (in Ophüls’ words the earrings are “a tiny, scarcely visible axis”) around which develops a portrayal of marital crisis, love, infidelity, and eventually violent death; but to focus on the emotionalism of these moments is I think to make a mistake. The emotions of these characters are movie emotions (notably we have one of the iconic love-via-montage scenes); they feel what they need to feel for the plot to advance – the character of each character has been selected for maximum reconfigurability, like the musical phrases used to build a fugue. Ophüls is more invested in a rhythm, an ease and fluidity, than he is in any suffering these motions of the earrings might inflict in passing. As such, this a very relaxing film to watch. It’s something like watching a stream thread through rocks, the current complexified but never halted.
Compounding this sense is the setting, the upper strata of Belle Époque Paris, and the presiding genius, who is Proust. This is not a formal linkage – the film is based on a novel by Marie Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin, a woman with a Proustian name, but not Proust. But Proust’s lepidopteran interest in the upper-classes, and especially in the dry way they conduct their passions, is strongly echoed. For Proust love is important, but it is not good, and it is not romantic – he endorses the dryness, or rather he concedes it, or rather he doesn’t see love as anything worth not being dry over. It’s largely a matter of mechanics: we want what we don’t have, we move to claim it, once we have it our desire wanes. Madame and the General are mutual claimants. They sleep in separate (sumptuous) beds, but those beds face each other so that, as needed, they can coordinate their activities. Obviously there can be little love in such a line-of-sight partnership. By contrast, when Madame’s passion for an Italian diplomat becomes too marked, and the General reacts by sending her out of town, readers of Proust will groan inwardly: we know that there is no better way to enflame a passion than to separate it from its object. The film’s one false beat is its deviation from this Proustian ethos – when the General, confronted again and again with Madame’s love for her diplomat, tells her that she has wounded him by proving that their marriage is a sham. This is, sort of, hilarious, and I prefer to believe that the General is being ironic here, and that the true source of his sorrow is that she has proven to be such an unreliable co-worker. Madame’s own complaint, unvoiced, is that has been asked to shoulder too much of the burden without reward.
The thing to say about Ophüls is that he moved his camera a lot. This is true. Each movement is conscious, planned, and free (we imagine the camera not on a flat track, but on the twisting three-dimensional frame of a roller-coaster). When watching it is tempting to conspire with the camera to outsmart the characters on the screen, to know more than they do because we know how their creator wishes them to be seen. When the camera is still (that is, mute) as it largely is in the culminating duel between the General and Madame’s diplomat, the effect is to make us uncertain; we’ve lost our guide.
On that duel – the diplomat is played by Vittorio De Sica (who directed Bicycle Thieves and much else, and whose avoirdupois initially intimidated Ophüls). With his large, rounded features, he comes across as a rounder character than Madame or the General. He is more modern and more freely able to define himself – when we first meet the General he is in uniform (and is often seen in a gorgeous squared-off cape); when we first meet De Sica he is in a rumpled suit, and a fedora. As befits our perhaps self-blind idea of modernity, De Sica appears gentler than his pre-modern foil. Yet when the General, on a trumped up pretext, challenges De Sica to a duel, he is quick to accept – which I at least felt sorry for. In our last view of De Sica he is all starched up, in formal attire, head turned to give us the flintiest possible aspect of his profile as he awaits death at the General’s hands. We wish that he could have been allowed to face death with a little more of our modern neurosis. A film I would watch: an Italian diplomat, challenged to a duel by a French military man in fin-de- siècle Paris, squirms and schemes and uses every dirty trick in the book to get out of it.
A detail, via Philip Lopate: Ophüls, a German Jew, was chased through Western Europe by Nazi expansion, eventually escaping to Hollywood. He brought with him both his wife and a mistress, and had a set of rules for reconciling them. For the mistress he bought cut flowers, because they were impermanent. For his wife he bought a living plants, which would last and grow over time. You have to wonder in what spirit each was received.
A final note: if I am wrong about this being, in a good way, a bloodless film - or to be more exact, if my response isn’t rich enough - then the dispositive scene is the one in the church, just before the duel, where Madame prays for the life of her diplomat.
