Ophuls’s men are as important as his women. becomes the “passionate and profound woman,” but Ophuls doesn’t accept the “serious man,” with his “ready-made justifications,” at face value. Thanks to the cataclysm of love that descends on her, Danielle Darrieux’s Madame de. And the stakes are the highest there are: the very meaning of existence. It is the anxious assumption of this risk that gives her story the colors of a heroic adventure. She knows the constant tension of unsupported freedom it puts her in constant danger she can win or lose all in an instant. The so-called serious man is really futile, because he accepts ready-made justifications for his life whereas a passionate and profound woman revises established values from moment to moment. In my own appreciation at the time, I called the Ophulsian heroines by Stendhal’s epithet, the “militarists of love.” They are the adventurers, the risk takers, like the Stendhal heroines celebrated by Simone de Beauvoir: Yet even in this reappraisal, the “guy films” got more respect. Most often, women who are unhappily in love, or to whom love brings misfortune of one kind or another.” Ophuls’s star rose during the cultural revolution of the late sixties and early seventies, when auteurist and feminist critics elevated the woman’s film along with such culturally underrated genres as the gangster film and the western. , a period film about an upper-class woman whose cushioned existence is light-years away from that of the ordinary people of contemporary cinema and the toilers on the margins of life? The “woman’s film” label shouldn’t be a handicap in this day and age, as it was in the early sixties, when critic Richard Roud defended Ophuls with faint praise in a monograph: “What are Ophuls’s subjects? The simplest answer is: women. Is Ophuls left off of those lists because the German-born director and man of the world made films about women, and in the case of 1953’s The Earrings of Madame de. This in turn implies an effort with a socially redeeming political or quasi-political ambition, a dissection (and, often covertly, a celebration) of the ways of powerful men. To most people, “great” means big, inescapably masculine and bold, and probably Important with a capital I. Every year, thanks to committed revival houses, new members are recruited to our cult, but Ophuls’s masterpiece never seems to attain the universal accolade of “greatness” automatically granted to movies like The Godfather or Citizen Kane. at the top of our list of all-time favorite films, the mystery is why our passion isn’t universally shared. For those of us who rank The Earrings of Madame de.
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