The Marquise of O

Eric Rohmer adapts "with book in hand," though, visually, the pregnant and banished frau is not so much Kleist's noblewoman as Murnau's Gretchen (Faust). "Suddenly, the war..." The family chateau is stormed and the Italian Marquise (Edith Clever) is assaulted by Russian soldiers, the rescuing Count (Bruno Ganz) is first seen heroically lit with Napoleonic locks flowing. The "dishonorable act" that transforms savior into ravisher takes place as a discreet memory of Fuseli, or the aftereffect of poppy-seed slumber. Morpheus is jokingly credited for the heroine's morning queasiness ("Maybe you will give birth to a fantasy"), a bulging belly is harder to explain. The devoted young widow finds herself with child, her parents (Edda Seippel and Peter Lühr) cannot accept her innocence. (Father quells a family squabble by firing a pistol into the air and then has to fan the fainting mother, the staging is pure Molière.) Set in another country and another century, but a Moral Tale nevertheless—gestures delineated with a gallant scalpel, decisions that can "defy the whole world," the glow of faces caught between control and abandon. Rohmer's combination of ascetic formalism and emotional flares can be as wondrous as Kubrick's in Barry Lyndon, sensuously keyed to Néstor Almendro's study of Romanticism: Friedrich amber, Overbeck contours, Runge verdure. The Marquise's newspaper ad reveals the culprit, his trajectory from "angel" to "devil" is consummated. (At the wedding, the bride's eyes are on the spiraling cherub in the fresco behind the altar.) The first of Rohmer's profoundly strange excursions into the past. Perceval envisions a medieval Caligari, The Lady and the Duke bridges Jacobin depredations with those of digital cinema, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon travels to the fifth century to rediscover natural sunlight. With Otto Sander, Eduard Linkers, Ruth Drexel, and Bernhard Frey.