La Ronde (1950) - film review

An all-knowing master of ceremonies guides us through a series of brief love affairs that take place in Vienna of 1900, using a carousel as a metaphor for the revolving series of liaisons which he nudges along.  The love waltz begins with a young soldier who reluctantly avails himself of the services of a prostitute before seducing an innocent gamine.  The latter becomes a housemaid to a gauche aristocrat who cannot help succumbing to her in a moment of madness.  Emboldened by this clumsy initiation into love, the aristocrat begins an affair with a married woman, whose husband reserves his passions for his young mistress.  The pattern of tragically brief romantic escapades continues until it finally comes full circle, ending with the streetwalker who began the merry-go-round of love...

After a successful but artistically frustrating stint in Hollywood, where he crafted such films as the memorable melodrama Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and the moody film noir drama The Reckless Moment (1949), director Max Ophüls returned to France to make the four films for which he is now best known, four auteur masterpieces which overshadow both his American films and those which he made in Germany before WWII.  The first of these was La Ronde, an inspired and exceedingly tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the scandalous stage play Reigen by the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler, which was intended to satirise the class-dodging sexual habits of Viennese society at the turn of the 20th century.  The same play would subsequently be adapted by Roger Vadim as La Ronde (1964), with very little of the charm and stylistic brilliance with which Ophüls’s film is endowed and which has made it a timeless classic.

Through a series of dovetailing love vignettes, all short but beautifully formed, Ophüls transforms Schnitzler’s play into a poignant reflection on the ephemeral nature of love which is both melancholic and humorous.  With a cast-list that is made up of some of the most distinguished French actors of the period, the film could hardly fail to be a commercial success - it drew an audience of over two and half million in France, in spite of some harsh reviews from the critics, who saw little merit in it at the time.  The film’s success in France created a short-lived fad for similar anthology films, effectively collections of short films linked by a common theme, almost invariably featuring a star-studded cast.  

The subject matter and structure of La Ronde gave Ophüls far more creative freedom than he had enjoyed previously and this allowed him to develop his idiosyncratic visual style, which is characterised by its beautiful chiaroscuro lighting and highly fluid camera work.  There is something of the elegance of a Viennese waltz in the way the camera tracks endlessly across the elaborate sets, reinforcing the carousel motif which Ophüls uses brilliantly to connect the ten perfectly rounded vignettes which make up the film.  Few other directors have exploited the potential of the long take and the mobile camera as masterfully as Ophüls did in this and his three following French films: Le Plaisir (1952), Madame de... (1953) and Lola Montès (1955).

La Ronde’s other great stylistic touch is the inclusion of a God-like master of ceremonies, played with devastating élan by Anton Walbrook.  The latter not only links the various stories but also plays an active part in some of them, fulfilling the role of commentator, confidante and Cupid.  Walbrook’s enigmatic character allows Ophüls to indulge in a humorous spot of fourth wall demolition (making it as much a commentary on the fraught art of filmmaking as anything else) whilst giving the film a satisfying coherence which subsequent portmanteau films lacked.  When things get a little too steamy, we are instantly snatched away from the bedroom to see Walbrook mournfully cutting up reels of film - a wry reference to the studio censorship that blighted Ophüls’s time in Hollywood.  Another effective linking device is Oscar Straus’s exquisite score, which includes Walbrook’s recurring merry-go-round ballad; in the best Viennese tradition, this seemingly cheerful air has an undertone of sadness and loss that is fitting for a film which evokes so wondrously the bitter transience of romantic love.

© James Travers 2011

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