Le Plaisir (1952) - film review

The writer Guy de Maupassant recounts three of his short stories to show that pleasure should not be confused with happiness.  In Le plaisir et la jeunesse (Le Masque), an old man goes dancing at the Palais de la danse, wearing a mask to conceal his aged features.  One evening, he collapses through his wild exertions on the dance floor and is taken home to his long suffering wife by a kindly young doctor.  The latter sees in his patient the sad future that awaits him.  In Le plaisir et la pureté (La Maison Tellier), the patrons of a popular Parisian brothel are indignant when their favourite haunt is closed for business one Saturday.  The owner, Madame Tellier, has been invited to attend the first communion of a relative in the country and has taken her girls along with her.  During the communion, Madame Tellier and her entourage experience a surge of transcendent feeling which infects the entire congregation.  The next day, it is business as usual and the girls are back at the Paris brothel, merrily frolicking with their clients.  In Le plaisir et la mort (Le Modèle), a young artist and his model fall so deeply in love that they decide to live together.  Theirs is a perfectly happy life, until the day when they begin to get a little too used to each other and start bickering.  In the end, the artist must abandon his muse, but she has no intention of letting him go.  When she realises the hopelessness of her cause, the model tries to kill herself by throwing herself out of a window.  She survives, but is paralysed.  Stricken with remorse, the artist has no choice but to marry his former lover and devote the rest of his life to her.

Le Plaisir, Max Ophüls’ follow-up to his well-received love merry-go-round La Ronde (1950), adopts a similar episodic structure, this time comprising three segments on the theme of pleasure taken from short stories by Guy de Maupassant.  Whilst pleasure is easy to come by, the film argues, happiness is a much rarer jewel which few have the privilege to possess.  The longest segment, based on La Maison Tellier, is the film’s centrepiece, one that colourfully evokes the world of the French impressionist painters Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Auguste Renoir with its vibrant sketch of Parisian nightlife and sun-drenched rural simplicity.  This is book-ended with two much shorter episodes which together take up less than a third of the runtime and offer a more melancholic counterpoint to the gay experiences of Madame Tellier and her girls.  The cast list reads like a Who’s Who of French cinema and includes such legendary performers as Jean Gabin, Danielle Darrieux, Madeleine Renaud, Simone Simon, Pierre Brasseur, Gaby Morlay and Claude Dauphin, as well as a plethora of distinguished character actors.  Like La Ronde, the film is hopelessly self-indulgent but irresistibly charming, its dramatic shortcomings amply made up for by its magnificent design and unwavering sense of fun.

Le Plaisir has long been acclaimed for its remarkably fluid camera work, which out-does even Citizen Kane in its ambition, expressive power and virtuosity.  In the opening segment, the camera literally drags the spectator into the heart of a bustling dance venue and somehow creates the illusion that he is caught up in the action, consumed in a wearying frenzy of dance.  In the second segment, the crane-mounted camera makes voyeurs of us all as it roams up and down the Maison Tellier, lingering by the windows to allow us to catch a glimpse of the lubricious activities taking place within its walls.  Finally and most dramatically, in the third segment the camera takes the place of a suicidal character and throws itself out of an upstairs window, dragging the spectator with it.  Ophüls is by no means the first film director to use the camera in this way, to make the audience feel they are active participants rather than passive observers in what is projected onto the screen, but he goes further than others (perhaps even Hitchcock) dared in this innovative masterpiece.

Although Max Ophüls had, by this stage in his career, acquired a certain distinction, on the strength of several notable films he had made in his native Germany and Hollywood, it wasn’t until he moved to France in the 1950s that his artistic potential was fully realised.  La Ronde and Le Plaisir were justly celebrated for their elaborate stylisation - the camera no longer a mere recording device but something that had become the most dynamic element of the film.  Ophüls’ films derive a balletic grace and momentum from his trademark long takes with their grand, sweeping camera movements, a technique which the director would refine to perfection on his next two films, Madame de... (1953) and Lola Montès (1955).  The latter represent not only the pinnacle of Ophüls’ career but impressive landmarks of French cinema. 

Max Ophüls’ films were especially praised by those young firebrand critics who would shortly become leading players in the French New Wave.  Jean-Luc Godard remarked that Le Plaisir was "the greatest French Film made since the Liberation" whilst Paul Vecchiali was sufficiently impressed by Ophüls to comment that his work alone justified the Lumière brothers’ discovery of the moving image.  Whilst such observations have a whiff of hyperbole about them, there is no doubt that Max Ophüls was a great innovator and auteur who pushed the boundaries of cinematic expression in his later years.  Le Plaisir may not be the most polished or the most emotionally engaging of Ophüls’ late films, but it is easily the most experimental and the most daring.  One of the many film directors to have been influenced by Le Plaisir is Stanley Kubrick, who pays homage to Ophüls’ penchant for uninhibited camera motion in several of his films, most obviously The Shining (1980).

© James Travers 2011

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