THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE… Movie Review
Diamond Earrings
Madame de…
Narcissistic and spoiled, Madame de … (Danielle Darrieux) lives in ostentatious comfort with her military husband (Charles Boyer); she's so accepting of their unemotional marital arrangement—and their separate bedrooms—that she's unashamed to pawn for a little extra cash the earrings her husband gave her. But when the same earrings find their way back to her by way of her new lover, the dashing Baron Donati (Vittorio De Sica), her desire now to keep them as precious symbols of his love drives this dizzyingly romantic, heartbreaking masterpiece to its inevitable, tragic conclusion.The physical perfection and ingeniously symmetrical structure of Max Ophuls's The Earrings of Madame de… is easy to see; its surface glitters with the opulent palaces and opera houses of a long-ago Paris, and the ceaseless, fluid camera movement plunges the viewer headlong into her vertiginous romantic plunge. Yet that surface is only an elegant means of transportation into the romantic world that Ophuls ruled; his famous tracking shots and swirling images were like the mirrors in a Cocteau film, on the other side of which existed a world of dreams vastly more real and affecting than our own. The power of Madame de… is achieved by Ophuls's alchemy—a confluence of form and truth that is, to say the least, vastly more wrenching than the sum of its parts. There are a dozen or so films—not exactly twelve, perhaps, but hardly a huge number by any measure—that I consistently believe to be the best movie I've ever seen, every time I see it. That Madame de … is among that number each time I see it remains rapturous proof to me that despite frequent suspicions to the contrary, my lifetime in the dark has not been entirely misspent.
NEXT STOP … La Ronde, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Lola Montès
1954 105m/C FR Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, Vittorlo De Sica, Lea di Lea, Jean Debucourt; D: Max Ophuls; W: Max Ophuls, Marcel Archand, Annette Wademant; C: Christian Matras; M: Oscar Straus, Georges Van Parys. Nominations: Academy Awards '54: Best Costume Design (B & W).VHS FCT, MRV, CVC