DVD of the Week: Le Plaisir

Had the German director Max Ophüls not gone to France, France would have gone looking for him, because his echt-bittersweet view of life was joined to a sensibility so refined and a style at once so exquisite and so elaborate as to place him in the tradition of Proust. His 1952 adaptation of three stories by Guy de Maupassant, scooped up under a title that means “Pleasure,” revolves around the writer himself. The movie, which I discuss in the clip above, begins with a black screen over which a fictionalized version of Maupassant (played by Jean Servais) introduces his stories, each of which—particularly as filmed by Ophüls—is centered around an aspect of pleasure: an old man, a retired hairdresser to the beau monde and once a legendary seducer, who chases erotic dreams in a dance hall; a group of prostitutes from a brothel who leave the men of their town destitute for a Saturday night when they head to the countryside for a first communion, and whose own lost dreams inflame the church with an unexpected passion of piety; and the eternal tale of an artist and his model and the surprising bond that outlasts their first love.

Maupassant’s stories have a strangely strong power on the cinema—they read like sketches by an extraordinarily perceptive, witty, vigorous, and impatient painter. (They inspired Jean Renoir’s “A Day in the Country,” which will play at BAM this weekend, and they would inspire Jean-Luc Godard’s “Masculine Feminine.”) The great critic André Bazin highlighted precisely these qualities in Maupassant’s writing—and, in doing so, explained why he didn’t like the movie that Ophüls made of these stories:

What’s important is to preserve the rapidity of the line, the movement of its curve, even incomplete; the aptness of the silhouettes rather than the resemblance of the faces. In this kind of adaptation, the “mise en scène” is secondary, and can be pardoned of anything except the exactness of tone, the consonance with its model…. Whereas Max Ophüls, on the contrary, crushes it under the fallacious luxury of details, the finish of the décor, the sumptuousness of the photography, the mastery of the construction, the brio of the performances.

It didn’t strike Bazin that, in precisely the ways he describes, Ophüls didn’t merely depart from Maupassant, he improved on him. Certainly, the movie’s concluding line—“Le bonheur n’est pas gai” (“happiness is not cheerful”)—one of the greatest and most inspiring lines in the cinema—is not found in Maupassant’s text (and thanks should also go to Ophüls’s screenwriter, Jacques Natanson). But, more important, the images that give rise to it include a figure of visual style that’s more audacious, more original, more moving, and more beautiful than is Maupassant’s prose.