Feb 14: Lola Montes (1955--Max Ophuls)

★★

Ok…I’ll lose my lover-of-French-cinema card, but I didn’t like this movie.

I understand what the New Wavers liked about it. There’s the constant defamiliarization of cinema convention with the story fragmented into separate performances and presented in nonchronological order. There’s a ringmaster who talks to the audience (us?) about Lola's story and even appears as a character in it. There are multiple layers of self-conscious reality jumping among the circus frame and the bio episodes. There’s even defamiliarization of the circus, which has masks related to Lola’s story and bizarre characters like the faceless children. There’s soundtrack play with reverb in some dialogue to conjure the circus performance while the movie is running in a more conventional narrative vein, again highlighting the mechanics of the movie. Things like the sweeping crane shots that end focused on a chandelier and the over-the-top theatricality won't let us relax into a mimetic viewing mode.

And in all this self-consciousness, there’s a good story. Lola vogues with Franz Liszt, escapes exploitation by her mother, exits a terrible marriage, seduces a teenager, has a romantic affair with a King, escapes a revolution and lands in a circus. That’s an interesting story.

But as good as all this sounds, I was bored to tears by the movie. I disliked the circus that was the central vehicle for the story; in fact, I disliked it so much that I’m almost afraid to revisit the extravagant Fellini films from the 60s that I remember with such fondness. What if they’re as tedious and academic as the circus looks here? I got very tired of Peter Ustinov yelling at me in his limited, circus-barker, ladies-and-GENTlemen voice, and the stilted acting of Martine Carol (Lola) didn’t engage me in the least. I know she was faulted for her acting at the time, but given how self-conscious and idea-driven the film is, I’d point my finger at Ophuls, if not for the acting itself then for the casting. The only part of the film that engaged me at all was the segment with Anton Walbrook as Ludwig I of Bavaria, and having seen Walbrook in Red Shoes and Colonel Blimp recently, I suspect that this segment is good because he could play opposite a floating log and make the scene compelling.

Too much idea here and too little cinema. Count me among the Bavarian peasants when it comes to Lola.