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Le Plaisir

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The screen is pitch black and we hear a voice..."I'm so happy to be talking in the dark as if I were beside you, and maybe I am." The speaker is Guy de Maupassant (voiced by Jean Marais), and Le Plaisir is three of his stories filmed by the great director Max Ophuls. The connecting thread? That pleasure, or even love, lies in how people intermingle their lives, with a shrug, assumptions, an apology, a thank you. Le Plaisir is not so much a sophisticated film of attraction and hope as it is a film of rueful wisdom. It's best to keep in mind while watching this movie that while life can be enjoyed, there are times when hope can disappear.

The three stories consist of, first, La Masque. We are in 19th Century Paris at the Palais de la Dance, where great, swirling balls are held. This is a place where young women hope to find pleasure and rich men; where old women chase memories and young suitors; where prostitutes and their pimps gather, where the men are young bucks and old goats, where "rough cotton to the finest cambric" can combine. One slender man in full dinner dress rushes into the palace and begins to dance with a beautiful young woman. He prances and kicks, yet his face is like a frozen mask of youth. He collapses on the dance floor and a doctor is called. When the doctor loosens the man's clothes, he finds...well, let's say that when the man is delivered home to his wife by the doctor, she tells him a story of the battle between pleasure and love.

In La Maison Tellier, we learn all about a cozy, friendly and long established brothel in a small town on the Channel coast. The bourgeois men of the town are as well-known there as they are to their wives. Then Madame decides to close her establishment for a night so that she and her girls can travel into the countryside to attend her niece's first communion. They have one or two adventures on the train. In the small village they spend the night with Madame's brother and meet the young girl. They attend the communion in the village church. They collect flowers on the way back, and are met with genuine affection and with great gaiety when Madame reopens her place of business the following night. We witness a touching story, as de Maupassant tells us, when pleasure and purity come together.

Le Modele gives us a story where pleasure struggles with moral decay, where "happiness is not a joyful thing." We witness a painter and his model meet, rapturously embrace lust and, as lust tires, recrimination grows. The love which endures as the story plays out may not be most people's idea of happiness.

This is a marvelously told series of stories. La Masque and Le Modele are relatively short bookends to the major tale of La Maison Tellier. With this one, it would be difficult not to become delighted and engaged with Madame and her girls and her brother. Even the puffed up townsmen are not without a sympathetic side; which man among us wouldn't mind being flattered, even for a price, by Madame's girls?

In the cast are some of France's best known actors, including Claude Dauphin, Danielle Darrieux, Jean Gabin, Daniel Gelin, Simon Simon, Madeleine Renaud and Pierre Brasseur.

Please note that the Criterion release is not scheduled until September 16, 2008. My comments are based on the Region 2 release which I own. I like this film so well I plan to buy the Criterion Region 1 version when it comes out. After I have a chance to look at Criterion's extras, I'll post an extra paragraph here about them.

This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.

Le Plaisir, meaning "pleasure" is a film based on three stories by Guy de Maupassant. Le Masque, La Maison Tellier, and Le Modèle.

In the first story, Le Masque, an elderly man hides his age with a mask and goes to a ball and dances energetically with a woman and he later falls down in exaustion. In the second story, La Maison Tellie, the women and madam of a brother go on a field trip. In the third story, Le Modèle, a woman falls in love with a male artist whom she poses for.

I found the film to be entertaining and liked the opening sequence with the old man in the mask.

The DVD has some great supplements too which are quite good. Todd Haynes gives an introduction to the film, also is a video slideshow with narration which provides the transition of the film from its script to its production, there are also interviews with actor Daniel Gélin, and crewmembers, Tony Aboyantz, and Robert Christidès. There are also alternate language versions of the opening narration in English and German.

This is a film that you won't want to miss.

I love the films of Max Ophüls; he has such a way with the camera. This B&W French film from 1952 is particularly tricky because the camera is always in motion. The story is made up of 3 vingettes having to do with pleasure, and perhaps the price that is sometimes paid for pleasure. I like The Earrings of Madame de... more, but this is a good one to add to your collection.

When Max Ophuls returned to France after his engagement in Hollywood, he made his last 4 pictures..LA RONDE, LE PLAISIR, THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE.., and LOLA MONTES. Each was a masterpiece. Some critics list LOLA and MADAME DE as the best films ever made. Of the 4, LE PLAISIR is the least well known or acknowleged, but it has all the hallmarks of a great Ophuls movie..the distinctive and elegant camera movements, attention to detail, superb casts, depth of feeling, moral complexity, and strong feminist viewpoint.

The film is based on 3 stories by Guy de Maupassant..The Mask, The Tellier House, and The Model (which replaced a different story that had a more risque plot). The central story of The Tellier House is the main one, and is framed by the 2 shorter ones. All the stories are tales about male/female relationships, where the women are in a sense willing victims of the men. Victims might be the wrong word, because although outwardly, they are subordinate, trapped in cages by circumstance and dependent relationships, inwardly, they are mentally and emotionally braver and stronger than the men they are attached to. Each story is beautifully filmed and has visually breathtaking moments. In The Mask, it's the tracking shot in the ballroom leading up to the frenetic entrance of the masked reveler. In The Tellier House, the opening sequence slowly peering through the caged windows of the bordello, and the scene in the country church when Madame Rosa's weeping becomes contagious. In The Model, the staircase scenes where Jean and Josephine first meet, the fight that the camera fluidly follows through a number of rooms, and the final flight of Josephine up the stairs and to her destiny.

As usual, the extras on this Criterion set are praiseworthy, including a booklet, an introductory filmed essay by the noted director Todd Haynes (best seen after the movie),and several interviews with notables involved in the making of LE PLAISIR. All in all a real pleasure.

Max Ophuls' film consists of three short stories from the pen of Guy de Maupassant which he imbues with his fluid camera and visual expertise. The first story THE MASK concerns an aging roué trying to relive his youthful indiscretions. The third THE MODEL focuses on the neurotic relationship between an artist (Daniel Gelin) and his model (Simone Simon). But the film's centerpiece is the exquisite THE TELLIER HOUSE in which a madam (Madeleine Renaud) closes down her brothel in order to take her "girls" (including the wonderful Danielle Darrieux) with her to the country to attend the first communion of her brother's (Jean Gabin) daughter. While perhaps not as perfectly realized as EARRINGS OF MADAME DE ... or LA RONDE, it remains a sterling example of Ophuls' art.

The Criterion DVD is a handsome B&W transfer in its appropriate 1.33 aspect ratio.

(I can't resist) LE PLAISIR is a pleasure. It's brilliant.

Director Max Ophuls transferred 3 Guy de Maupassant stories (set circa the late 1800s) to the screen while retaining an amazingly strong sense of their literary source.

The 3 stories are a wry look at love. They're not for those people "in love with love". They're for and about cynical, down-to-earth types. Despite that, the stories are vibrant and fun and I never lost interest.

This is a B&W film, directed with Ophuls mystical touch and influenced by the Impressionistic paintings of the story's milieu.

It's an ensemble piece filled with wonderful actors. Just to name a few: Danielle Darrieux -- so very lovely here -- and she gets to show off her equally lovely singing voice a little. Jean Gabin. Claude Dauphin. And a delightful surprise for me, Simone Simon, who demonstrates how much she was wasted by Hollywood.

This is a quality DVD from the Criterion Collection. The special features include an interview with one of the actors, Daniel Gélin, and an insightful behind-the-scenes presentation by French film scholar Jean-Pierre Berthome (speaking in English). I would suggest watching the "Intro" by Todd Haynes AFTER seeing the movie since he gives away too much for my taste (these stories are full of little surprises) -- but definitely watch it.

A couple years earlier, Max Ophuls made a similarly-themed ensemble piece with many of the same actors which Criterion has also made available: LA RONDE.

Max Ophuls's anthology of three Guy de Maupassant stories all revolve around the same theme of how difficult the pursuit of pleasure is and what must be sacrificed for it. Like of all of his films, the stories all center upon the problems of loving in different ways and showcase his extraordinary gifts with camera motion and mise-en-scene. The first story, "La Masque," is the thinnest of the three, and involves the secret behind a masked man who collapses while dancing with abandon at the Palais de la danse; the third, "La Modele," also seems not much more than a sketched-out anecdote, and concerns the horrifying upshot of a failing relationship between an artist and his lovely model (Simone Simon). The central story, "La Maison Tellier," is the longest of the three stories and by far the best. It may be one of the finest short stories ever filmed for the screen (with other possible contenders being Renoir's 1946 A DAY IN THE COUNTRY, also based on a Maupassant story, and Satyajit Ray's "The Postmaster," in his collection TWO DAUGHTERS, based on a Rabindranath Tagore tale). The bare sketch of the action of this episode involves the madam of a small town's brothel takes her prostitutes to her brother's place in the country for her niece's first communion, while the men back in the town suffer through the unexpected loss of their greatest pleasure in life. Meanwhile, the prostitutes find themselves unexpectedly affected by their change of scene and by the central ritual during their vacation, while the madam's brother (the great Jean Gabin) becomes enamored of one of his sister's women (Danielle Darrieux). When the women return to their town, the townsmen and the prostitutes alike celebrate the return of the normal routine of pleasure.

Part of what makes this central episode so particularly great is that the story's plot cannot do justice to its mysterious poignancies and subtle effects; it assumes the leisurely pace of a weekend vacation itself and doesn't rush things. The episode is genuinely moving, and Ophuls allows the viewer as much sympathy for all the characters, and also shows how pleasure can be made relative by varying contexts (although a peasant woman recognizing the women for what they are in their railway carriage turns her nose up at them after leaving, the brother's countrymen treat the harlots as glamorous visitors from the city and compliment him for bringing them out). All three episodes are worth seeing if only for Ophuls's incredible use of sets and of movement through them. The Palais de la danse sequence that begins the first episode has been much celebrated, as are the crane shots outside the brothel that show the hidden pleasures within that both open and close "La Maison Tellier," and the great POV shot in "La Modele" that brings its action to a climax. There's a very helpful "introduction" that should be seen after the film (instead of before it) by the independent director Todd Haynes, and several interesting other extras.