The year was 1950 and film director Max Ophüls was returning to Europe. He had spent the decade of the 1940s in the United States, where between 1947 and 1949 he had made four films. He was returning to France, which had welcomed him in 1933 after the Nazis came to power and had granted him citizenship in 1938. He would live another seven years and complete four more films in France, but until 1957, when he died prematurely, he would never return to work in Germany. ‘La Ronde‘ represented his film of reunion with French cinema and European culture. I do not think the choice of subject was accidental. It is the screen adaptation of a play by Arthur Schnitzler, written in 1897, but which had been extremely controversial and censored and could not be staged before 1920, triggering scandals that even reached the courts. Posterity would be much more favorable to it, the play enjoying a growing international success and theatrical and cinematic remakes. In fact, this adaptation of Max Ophüls was also part of the relaunch of the play and the dramatic and cinematic formula invented by Schnitzler.
The way in which ‘La Ronde‘ is filmed and staged, as a fantasy in an explicitly theatrical setting, immediately reminded me of Wes Anderson’s recent films. The story also has a host (played by Anton Walbrook, an Austrian-born actor who had also fled Europe during the war) who introduces the audience to the story, connects the episodes and plays various secondary roles in the plot, accompanying it with an obsessive waltz that remains in the memory for many days. Each of the ten episodes features a couple of lovers and a more or less passionate relationship. One of the two will be in the next episode, creating thus a chain of connections that crosses social classes, material situations, power relations between men and women. A prostitute picks up a soldier, who in the next episode dances with a maid, who is seduced by the masters’ young son, who has a married woman mistress, who … and so on. The chain of relationships finally closes when the last man, an officer, wakes up in the bed of the prostitute from the first episode.
Each of the 10 episodes lasts less than 10 minutes, and obviously there is not much time to go into the depth of the characters’ psychology. The overall impression is about the whole, and it can be read as a gallant stroll or as a satirical commentary on male-female relationships and Viennese mores at the beginning of the 20th century. After all, each of the characters maintains relationships with at least two people of the opposite sex, so the censors had reason to be concerned. The atmosphere is erotically charged, even if sex is never explicitly shown on screen. Later versions of the play would try to delve deeper into the fabric of relationships and adapt them to contemporary times. I saw in Bucharest a stage version of David Hare’s ‘The Blue Room’, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler‘s play, which premiered in London in 1998, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Nicole Kidman. In Max Ophüls‘s 1950 version, the cast is impressive, and here I found the second common element with Wes Anderson’s films. The cast of ‘La Ronde‘ includes a handpicked selection of the most famous French actors of the mid-20th century, happy to be in the film, even for a few minutes. Among them: Simone Signoret, Danielle Darrieux, Serge Reggiani, Jean-Louis Barrault, Gérard Philipe. The fluency of the long-shot filming in sumptuous settings is also remarkable. The return of Max Ophüls leaves the feeling of a joy of the director’s reunion, after returning from exile, with a Europe that no longer existed except in memories and imagination.