The Earrings of Madame De... (1953, Max Ophuls)
Monday 7th of July, 6:45pm in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema
Join us on Monday the 7th of July from 6:45pm (film starts at 7pm) in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema for a screening of Max Ophuls’s masterpiece The Earrings of Madame De… (1953). The film is 1 hour 43 minutes long so the screening will finish by 8:45pm.
The Earrings of Madame De… revolves around a pair of earrings given to the titular Madame de… (Danielle Darrieux) by her husband, a count and a general in the French army. She sells the earrings to pay her debts, setting off a chain of consequences. Set in Belle Époque France, in an aristocratic world of fine clothes, beautiful people, magnificent furnishings, refined etiquette, and a profusion of candelabras, jewellery and waltzes. This external opulence and masterful cinematography – one bravura tracking shot after another – is always in dialectical tension with the film’s unsentimental view of the superficiality and spiritual emptiness of its central character, who is “imprisoned by her own self-display,” as Molly Haskell puts it in her essay for the Criterion release. Featuring Vittoria De Sica, the famous director of Bicycle Thieves, the film is one of the finest portraits of Europe’s ancien regime before its dissolution, one capable of registering both its charm and the necessity for its end.
The film is highly regarded by many directors and critics. Wes Anderson and Edgar Wright both put the film in their all-time top ten for the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. The critics Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell have both called it their favourite film of all time. For Paul Thomas Anderson, Ophuls’s work has been profoundly influential, as he describes in this short video for the film’s Criterion release. The most obvious influence is in the preference for longer shots: a camera that pans, tracks and sometimes simply lingers. Both directors use this to more deeply immerse us in the world of the characters, to draw more depth from their actors’ performances, and to allow us to enjoy their orchestration of movement within the frame, often in spectacular set-pieces. But there are other affinities too. The ballroom scene in Madame De… has its echoes in the dance and party scenes of Boogie Nights. The chain of stories of interlinked couples in Ophuls’s La Ronde presages the interwoven narratives of paired characters in Magnolia; each film’s title is a metaphor for its formal structure – a circular dance, a flower with overlapping petals. The tight focus of Madame De… on the relationship between a pair complicated by a third person presages a similar focus in Anderson’s later work, in films like Punch-Drunk Love, The Master and Phantom Thread. Finally, there is a common interest in depicting a closed social world from the inside, in all its contradictions, leaving it up to us to decide what to make of it.