The Earrings of Madame de... (1953) dir. Max Ophüls. This is a movie about a lady and hear earrings. It is in French. I liked this movie! It does some neat things. You are now entering the spoiler zone. The are unmarked spoilers from here on out, so watch the movie before reading onwards. I want to highlight four things that I found interesting about the movie. First, the tracking shots and long takes that Patrick mentioned. Second, the slanted camera angle we get a couple times, as highlighted in the screen capture above. Third, the personalities of the three characters. The Tracking Shots and Long Takes These are pretty apparent if you're the sort of person who watches out for these things. Indeed, the very first shot in the movie is a long over the shoulder tracking shot that follows Madame de Whatever as she picks out her outfit. We're stuffed right into her closet along with her, and we only see her face when she sits down and it's reflected (and slanted) in a mirror. Later the tracking shots are equally veiled - they follow a character as the character walks through a room, but the camera is outside the house so we just see the character in one window, then a wall for most of the shot, then finally the character in another window, or the character is in a ballroom and they're constantly obscured by dancing couples and pillars - this happens multiple times. The effect would be one of disorientation - where is the character? Where have they gone? - except all of these shots are extremely long takes, too. We never cut, so we never get lost, despite the characters going out of sight for long stretches. For me, at least, I think this gives us a sense of being privy to the inner lives of these characters while simultaneously getting a sense that things are veiled even to them. The camera never loses anyone but things get in the way, and nobody ever misunderstands someone else even though they never talk straight with one another. Louise, her husband André, and Donati all basically know what is happening, but they never come out and say it. Louise's way of saying "I love you" is to say "I don't love you," André is always aware of everything that is going on but also holds back from flat out saying it (which is symbolized perfectly by that scene near the end, when Louise is heartsick from having her affair broken off, and André talks to her with the earrings in his pocket throughout almost the entire conversation), and Donati makes no secret about how he feels but he of course has to constantly pretend nothing is going on. Even the excuse for the duel at the end is made up. The hypocrisy and double talk everyone engages in (think also of how Louise often tells lies) is echoed visually by these long tracking shots. Slanty Scenes Twice (maybe thrice?) when André and Donati talk, the camera is angled. The shot above is an angled shot of André but the shots of Donati are also angled. These are scenes where the two are alone and are talking with each other, and because of the slant they of course contrast quite a bit with the rest of the movie, which is level like movies typically are. In both of these scenes André is exploiting his knowledge of the situation by toying with Donati and talking around things, which he does all the time, but I think he revels in it more when he does it with Donati compared to when he does it with Louise. With Louise, he seems to think he's trying to help her. That scene near the end, where he has the earrings in his pocket, is key, I think - he mentions how his life hasn't really turned out the way he would've liked, because he has changed himself for Louise's sake. He then tries to help her get over her sadness in his own odd stoic way. There's none of this in his relationship with Donati - that's harsh to the point where he eventually shoots Donati, of course, but even before that he does things like keeping Donati waiting in that room near the end of the film (when he eventually shows up, that conversation is one of the slanted ones). In fact I just went and checked: the film is indeed slanted at least three times. When he challenges Donati to a duel, we get another series of slanted shots: So I think it's pretty clear that the slant is all about the men, as opposed to Louise. The slant is playful and also sort of sinister, or off-kilter. It's funny but also wrong. To me this suggests a commentary on André's treatment of Donati. On the one hand, we get caught up in the jesting nature of it - it's fun to watch André toy with Donati and make jokes at his expense, and the tilted camera gives us leave to treat the whole thing as a farce. There is, though, an undercurrent of real menace there (rather than the undercurrent of tenderness that I think we get with André's treatment of Louise and the way he thinks he's helping her get over a difficult time in her life) and the slanted shot picks that out for us, because it's just wrong for the world to be slanted thus. The Three Characters We've got a pretty interesting set of people here, don't we? Louise is a funny mix of passion and manipulation - she's caught in the currents of this love, and it seems like it's taking control of her, but the way she manipulates people is by feigning faints, and we know she's a notorious flirt, so it's sort of unclear how much of the emotion she's putting into this is real and how much is an act. I think she probably doesn't know either - like the web of lies she builds up for not much reason, or all the machinations with the earrings, she's sort of dug herself in to a point where she's got to live and feel the things she at least pretends to live and feel. The apotheosis of this is of course the end, when she literally dies (well, maybe - we don't actually see it...) from emotion. Did she work herself up to the point where she died from exactly the weakness she was using as her strength? Or was she actually earnest the entire time? For spork armada this undermined the entire character. For me it gave her a lot of depth and ambiguity. Donati, if we take Louise at her word, doesn't even love her at the end of the film, and yet, he gets himself killed in the duel. He doesn't really care - look at that insouciant expression he's got in the above image! That's not a crummy picture I took while he was blinking - that's how he played the whole scene. Why the sudden change? Donati seemed head over heels the rest of the time, then suddenly, it's over when André says it needs to be over. I think Donati realizing how fully he had been found out and the enormity of what he had done (symbolized by him learning that the earrings were a gift from André originally) is a sign that Louise is right, and that really for Donati this was all about Donati. He has a conception of himself that's more important to him than even life itself, and when he can't keep up appearances in the way he wants, it all has to crumble for him. André is maybe the most interesting character. As I've noted above I see him as genuinely wanting to help Louise in his way. He says at one point that he has never been able to let himself feel sadness, and that he regrets it (or something like that). He clearly likes being in control - he is, after all, a general - and mastery of the situation and of his life seems like it's driving everything, but it's not clear what his end goal is. That one line about his life not having turned out like he would have liked is really suggestive, but we don't know what he means. It's clear, though, that somehow he's got regrets for everything, and all he can do is take charge of the situation he ends up in. When there's something he can't control, like how the earring are sold by his niece and show up again at his office, he gets angry and breaks his composure. Sorry this writeup was late! I enjoyed reading everyone else's thoughts. I recommend also watching this introduction to the film by Paul Thomas Anderson, one of Chris Remo's favorite directors. It's pretty good.