Le plaisir

Happiness, says the narrator at the end, is not a lark. And the film believes it, even though as he speaks the glimpses of children playing with kites and daintily placed chairs on the beach (echoing those set out earlier by Gabin in the back of his cart for the visiting prostitutes) continue to evoke the swirling compositional grace and elegance which mark the film's every moment. Far more unpredictable and radical than most portmanteau films, the highlight is the second story, which at first seems to be about a group of men who get together one night when the local brothel is closed, then follows the whores' trip to the country (with a delightful interlude on the train as they share the compartment with an old peasant couple and a randy salesman); then returns to the brothel - Ophuls' highly liberal camera ultimately pans deliriously around the windows from the outside as the place fills with dance, spilling celebration and delight. The many surprises of that story perfectly evoke the enormous span of human emotional experience; it touches on so many dreams of escape whereas the other two episodes, both much shorter and darker, remind us of the occasional price of such dreams.

"Le plaisir" presents three stories by Guy de Mauppasant. A more precise title would be "le plaisir de l'homme" because in all the stories men are the weak gender, unable to control their instincts.

A suitable subtitle would be "les réactions des femmes". The reactions differ from resignation (first story) to acceptance (second story) to resistance (third story).

In none of the stories a moral judgement is made, but the first and the last are more tragic while the middle one contains comedy elements. Because the middle one is also the biggest (longest) story, in one review the comparison with a religious triptych from the Middle ages is made.

Let me try to make the above somewhat less abstract. The first story is tragic from the male point of view. A man with a mask attends a ball. After a while he becomes unwell. When the mask is taken off it is revealed that the man is rather old. The tragic element is that the man keeps behaving below his age. The mask however does NOT indicate that the man is ashamed of his behaviour (as is the case in "Eyes wide shut" 1999, Stanley Kubrick), it only indicates that he wants to hide his real age.

The second story has comic element. Due to a company outing, a brothel is closed for one day. The male clients become bored and start quarreling with each other. There is no shade of condemnation in this story, nor regarding the girls, nor regarding the clients. In stead the brothel is portrayed as a very useful institute, keeping the social peace.

With respect to the cinematography, the dynamic cameramovements are worth mentioning, and this in a time that the camera was not at all handheld but a heavy piece of equipment.

Once again some examples as illustration. In the first story the camera movements illustrate the hectic of the ball. At the beginning of the second story the camera circles around the brothel, peeping inside windows but staying outside the building. These movements of the camera create a somewhat voyeuristic ambiance.

Max Ophuls is rightly regarded as a major filmmaker and this is a major work. If you'd heard of his fluid camera-work but hadn't seen a film bearing his signature this film would illustrate perfectly what people mean by his fluid camera-work. In 1952 the portmanteau film was hardly new; in England we had seen both Quartet and Trio (a joke in the early fifties had two hippies walking down Broadway and passing in turn cinemas where these titles were playing: One says 'Man, we better dig this crazy combo, it's fading fast') followed by Encore, all featuring short stories by Somerset Maugham but it's fair to say that all three lacked the visual style and sheer sumptuousness that Ophuls brings to DeMaupassant. Framed by The Mask and The Model the piece de resistance is The House of Madame Tellier, a four-reel examination of the role of the bordel in the provincial town - when they close for a day the whole sub-social life of the town is disturbed. If the lion's share of the plaudits go to the middle segment the others have more than their own individual moments and staples of French cinema like Jean Gabin, Danielle Darrieux and Simone Simon get to strut their stuff and pay their dues. A visual delight.

It has been rightly claimed that, between 1945 and 1955, Max Ophuls was the greatest director in the world, crafting a string of dense pearls unmatched before or since. Even 'Le Plaisir', supposedly a minor film in his canon would be a staggering masterpiece in anyone else's.

A triptych of Guy de Maupassant stories, it is also about a trio of Gods. The first two are shown to be limited: Maupassant, author, creator, narrator, speaks to us from the darkness, disembodied, all pervasive ('I could be sitting next to you'), responsible for everything we see - in the last story he crashes down to earth, and is responsible for a suicide attempt; and Ophuls' camera, seemingly weightless, able to navigate space with a freedom unavailable to humans - even it is barred from Madame Tellier's Establishment, forced to peek in from outside. It can reveal the bleak reality behind the prostitutes' gaiety, but is has no access, like the men who exploit them, to their souls.

Or does it? The stunning epiphany at the church, is, after all, on one level just a trick of the camera, or a mere figment of the women's imagination. As we would expect, the camerawork, composition, decor, music and acting are breathtaking and ambiguously nostalgic; what is more remarkable is the magic sense of nature, so rare in Ophuls, and, with the exception of the Archers, King Vidor and Lynne Ramsey, so rare in cinema.

Three tales from Guy de Maupassant are presented: The Mask, The Tellier House, and The Model, all of which were published in 'The Necklace and Other Tales' in 2003, and are probably in many other such collections of his short stories. The film adaptation is beautifully shot, includes some fine star power (Simone Simon, Jean Gabin, and Danielle Darrieux), and for the most part faithful to the stories, though there is some unfortunate softening. I have to say, the selection is not the greatest, as the first and last stories are just average works, and they're also both less than eight pages long. Even for an author who is known for being a master of brevity, the translation to the screen for the bookends of this set feels unsatisfyingly not well fleshed out (and the middle story ends up taking about 60 of the overall 97 minutes).

Ostensibly the three were selected to match a theme, which is the pursuit of pleasure. We do see that in these vignettes, and most notably, we see this pursuit ending in being denied. One man wears a mask when he gets older so he can go out dancing with the young girls (but collapses), others brawl because a bordello is closed on a Saturday night, and another desperately tries to get near one of the prostitutes that come out to see his daughter get her first communion. The foibles of men are on full display, and it's all a little pathetic. Perhaps this is nowhere more true than in getting married for reasons that don't relate to temperament or harmony, and suffering a lifetime of coldness as a result, which is the subject of the last tale.

Maupassant was the ultimate realist, not flinching from writing what life and love were really like, and the tone of the film is thus generally consistent with his work. Unfortunately in that middle effort, The Tellier House, there are some alterations. When the prostitutes are in the church in the story, they begin to cry, causing a wave of tears to ripple through the crowd. In the book, it's a sanctimonious and confused priest who believes that's it's a sign of God among them, but Maupassant is clearly making the situation absurd - both for the sentimental weeping and this reaction. In the film, it's the narrator - meant to be Maupassant himself - who draws the divine inference. It throws the tone of the scene off, is noticeably inconsistent with the rest of the story, and is certainly not in line with Maupassant's realism. Excised also is the bawdy song 'Granny,' that Rosa sings in the story, about an elderly lady remembering her past lovers, ruing the loss of her shapely legs and bygone charms, and admitting that she would masturbate alone in bed at 15. Ok, maybe that's not surprising for a film from 1952, even one out of France not subject to the puritanical production Code.

If director Max Ophüls had nailed that middle story, or included a better selection (of which there are many possible options), I would have enjoyed the film more. As it was, though, it's a solid effort and worth watching.