LE PLAISIR Movie Review

House of Pleasure

The three stories of which Max Ophüls's exhilarating Le Plaisir is comprised are based on tales by Guy de Maupassant. A woman explains to a doctor that her husband is phobic about becoming wrinkled. A madame agrees to shut down her business temporarily, so that she and her employees can attend her niece's first communion. Finally, a painter and his model have an affair, which has tragic, and then marvelous, consequences. Made immediately after his triumphant La Ronde, the whirling, lyrical, deeply romantic Le Plaisir displays in every frame Ophüls's joy at returning to the romantic Europe that the Nazis forced him to leave behind. Narrated by Peter Ustinov, who would appear as the ringmaster in Ophüls's final masterpiece, Lola Montès.

NEXT STOP … La Signora di Tutti, La Ronde, The Earrings of Madame de …

1952 97m/B FR Claude Dauphin, Simone Simon, Jean Gabin, Danielle Darrieux, Madeleine Renaud, Gaby Morlay; D: Max Ophuls. Nominations: Academy Awards '54: Best Art Direction/Set Decoration (B & W). VHS NOS, DVT, GVV