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Love and its victims, ghosts and memories, in a word, "l'existence." An opulent engagement party, where "The Wedding March" segues into "Marche Funèbre." ("Entry of the Gladiators" also has a role.) Mysterious footprints and uncorked champagne bottles, just a pair of dapper souls materializing at the event, paranormal commentators perched on the luncheon chandelier. "Careful, don't fall into the soup!" The ingénue (Jacqueline Daix) is to marry a stuffed shirt, her mother (Simone Berriau) is painfully familiar with amour perdu. The apparitions are the husband (Georges Vitray) and the lover (Marc Valbel) of the lady of the house, one dies mid-dance after and the other in the circus cage amid tigers. Unhappiness, "eventually all couples know it," a third phantom (Lucien Nat) turns up to defend the heroine. Cinema's evanescence is rather ectoplasmic, says Max Ophüls, his is a light comedy deeply haunted. Double exposure gives the transparent visitors, it itches when the living walk through them, "most annoying." End of a marriage in Paris, with rapid transitions that go into Citizen Kane. The roué hides a faint heart behind the tuxedo, the wild beasts he works with are scarcely less dangerous than the ardent runaway wife. The smitten seaman reads his beloved's farewell letter and shuffles away in the harbor at night, a single shot is heard in the darkness. Return to the present, a close-up of the triste widow tilts up to the operatic soprano and then down to a close-up of the young bride before dollying back for a full view of the crowded pavilion. "Always moving but unable to escape," one of the characters describes himself and, possibly, the Ophüls camera. Mankiewicz in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir has his own spectral sublimities to chase. With Pierre Finaly, Laure Diana, Maurice Devienne and Camille Bert. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |