Take Two

"Lola Montès," revived

By Matt Sussman

“Sadism demands a story,” remarked Laura Mulvey in her landmark piece of feminist film criticism, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” In Max Ophüls’ opulent swan song, Lola Montès (1955), sadism also demands a spectacle. Ophüls’ Technicolor rhapsody— newly restored by Rialto Picture to match the director’s original vision— opens in a three-ring circus worthy of DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Costumed dwarves, swinging chandeliers, horse-riding acrobats and tiers of audience members kaleidoscopically divide the frame, as the Ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) invites the audience to ask questions for 25 cents a piece to the star attraction, the scandalous adventuress Lola (the beautiful Martine Carol).

Each question begets another fantastic circus set piece, which act as a segue into a series of flashback sequences, as Lola— now in fragile health— recounts her former life as a dancer, agent provocateur, and lover to a succession of famous men: Franz Liszt, an English military captain, and finally King Ludwig I of Bavaria. The flashback sequences are Ophüls at his most fantastic. Each has its own seasonal color scheme, and his famous gliding camera work is in full effect as we follow Lola through the tiers of opera houses, around the confines of a ship and, most famously, through a garden terrace crowded with hundreds of extras as she leaves the stage to publicly berate a paramour.

The tension between perfect surfaces and the imperfections of the human heart is a longstanding theme in Ophüls’ work, which is perhaps why he was so consistently attracted to the glittering, hothouse demimonde of the belle époque era. Lola Montès is perhaps his most self-reflexive treatment of this theme, and thus, is one of the great films about film. Here, Ophüls has exposed the sawdust and tinsel mechanisms behind cinema, even as his film revels in the beautiful illusion that is produced. The framing sequences in the circus provide an obvious theatrical metaphor—as Ophüls goes between the elaborate show and the backstage hustle and bustle—but in one shot the outline of the dolly tracks can actually be made out beneath some hastily unrolled packing cloth as the camera pans back.

Sadism is a strong charge, and in Mulvey’s formulation it is the price a woman must pay for threatening the male gaze. In the classic studio system women were beautiful objects to be destroyed and often coiled their own nooses, as in Mulvey’s prime example: Gilda, the titular temptress played by Rita Hayworth in Charles Vidor’s 1946 film. But Lola is no Gilda. Ophüls’ film is ultimately sympathetic to its cowed heroine, who like many women to enter the dream factory, have been forced through the gauntlet of celebrity only to wind up on stage playing themselves at the mercy of the crowd’s schadenfreude.

In some respect, Ophüls was himself a Lola figure. Having gone from Germany to France, and then Hollywood and finally back to France, what would be his last credited film would become a money pit plagued by production woes, whose final, butchered form would be initially lambasted by critics and the public. The original American release was cut down to 75 minutes (from two hours) and started with what had originally been the film’s ending. In that final shot—now, truly a final shot—the camera pulls back from a caged Lola, tracking through the men lined up to kiss her hands at a dollar a peck. Although we have had to wait 40 years for the honor, to finally see Lola in all her glory is priceless.

topics: performance, producers, reviews

11.18.2008