NYFF. Lola Montès.

"A bodice-ripper invested with the profundity of a Stendhal novel, Lola Montès is also, even more than La Ronde, [Max] Ophüls's definite commentary on movie-watching," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. "The Earrings of Madame de... is a smoother and more precise valse romantique, but Lola Montès is Ophüls's boldest vision of film as a medium that reveres beauty in order to both nurture and mock dreams. After their own sobering affair with the film, viewers are left to echo Liszt's compliment to Lola: 'Thank you for the illusion.'"

"Artificiality and performance, in other words, are major concerns of this film, both on the level of the narrative, with characters playing literal and metaphoric roles, and, more reflexively, on the level of the film itself." Malcolm Turvey for Artforum: "Lola Montès is one of the most scrupulously honest films in the history of cinema, shining a light - long before political modernists of the 1960s such as Jean-Luc Godard and Nagisa Oshima - on the filmmaker's and viewers' willing complicity in the fabrications of the film's characters."

Updated through 10/13.

"The early 50s were a boom time for the circus as existential metaphor," writes Evan Kindley at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "First, in 1953, came Ingmar Bergman with Sawdust and Tinsel, followed in 1954 by Fellini's La Strada. The next year, their elder Max Ophüls delivered Lola Montès, his final film, which also uses a circus to dramatize the fallen condition of modernity. All three of these directors exploit the circus's familiar packaged surrealism, its subjection of the bizarre and unusual to the everyday control of the entertainment industry. But while Bergman and Fellini made scaled-down character dramas from this scenario and were primarily interested in circus performers as avatars of modern man (picking up the circus-freak-as-social-outsider topos laid down years before by Tod Browning), Ophüls alone is interested in the circus as an institution, as a relentlessly efficient machine for exploiting the eccentricities and excellences of exceptional human beings."

"The movie is a colossal spectacle about colossal spectacles, and the extravagant palette, the cavernous sets, and the wide-screen images in which Ophüls entombs Lola (and [Martine] Carol) contrast cruelly with the real-life pathos of the performers, whom the director’s own magnificent artistry cannot help but exploit as well as celebrate." Richard Brody in the New Yorker.

Online listening tip. Nathan Lee for WNYC's ART.CULT: "Sarah Palin is the New Lola Montès: A Conversation with Andrew Sarris."

Lola Montès screens at Film Forum from Friday through October 30; for further engagements, see Rialto's schedule.

Updates, 10/8: A "lesser film than Ophüls's Letter to an Unknown Woman, let alone The Earrings of Madame D..., Lola Montès can be shockingly inert—a stale sachertorte that might have worked as a silent film or an awkward early talkie," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Of course, Lola Montès is also a footnote in the psychohistory of taste. Like its subject, the movie demonstrated the power to cloud men's minds. After its 1963 showing at the NYFF, Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris announced he'd stake his critical reputation ('such as it is') on the proposition that Lola Montès was the greatest film of all time - repeating the assertion throughout the decade. Not until Pauline Kael pledged allegiance to The Last Tango in Paris in 1973 would an American critic fall so hard. It was, to cite another Ophüls title, a reckless moment."

In the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris recalls the film's critical reception from the mid-50s on, and then:

Some years ago, I sat on a doctoral panel at NYU with the late Bill Everson, our own Henri Langlois, for Richard Koszarski's defense of his thesis on the directorial career of Erich von Stroheim. When I expressed what I thought was a mild reservation about the von Stroheim oeuvre - I notoriously always ranked Sternberg over von Stroheim - Everson laughingly teased me about my addiction to camera movement. And the funniest thing is that I couldn't say anything in response because he was right. I am addicted to camera movement, and I assume Ophüls is to blame, though Ophüls never indulged in camera movement simply for its own sake. Whereas Ophüls' camera follows his characters, Stanley Kubrick's characters follow his camera. And Kubrick generously acknowledged a stylistic debt to Ophüls.

"Creating an intrinsically bifurcated gaze by juxtaposing sumptuous images within a gaudy staging," writes Acquarello, "Ophüls poses the question of audience complicity in cultivating the public appetite for celebrity, a moral ambiguity that is reflected in the shattering, parting shot of patrons queuing for a chance to kiss Montès's hand between the bars of a cage - collapsing the illusion of separation between reality and spectacle."

"The film has been treated as shabbily as its heroine," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. "Tom Burton, vice president of Technicolor Creative Services in Burbank, which brought Lola Montès back to vibrant life, says that the initial response to the movie happened because 'the public and the critics had been built up to see a rollicking sex romp about this notorious character. But instead, the portrait Max painted was a somewhat dark, introspective view of a woman in decline. It just didn't sit very well.'"

"Lola Montès is a near perfect marriage of classicism and modernism," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine. "With every frame saturated with unreasonable grandeur, Lola Montès is nothing short of an Ophüls-explosion."

Online listening tip. "Film Comment's Evan Davis speaks to the team behind the restoration of Lola Montès, in a podcast produced by Paul Brunick."

"Lola Montès can perhaps best be understood as a bridge between late-classical melodrama and the generic experiments of the various post-classical international new waves," suggests Chris Wisniewski in Reverse Shot. "Like the contemporaneous Hollywood films of Douglas Sirk, Lola uses delirious color, excessive mise-en-scène, and multiple planes within the frame - frequently, we see the principal characters from behind scrims, curtains, and windows - to place us at an emotional remove from the narrative of the film and expose the artifice at its core. But the circus scenes take this emphasis on artificiality to an extreme."

Update, 10/9: "As the circus ringmaster, Peter Ustinov is the ultimate showman, stylish and ruthless," writes Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times, "literally cracking a whip, wresting the last centime out of the fading Lola, but his remark that 'she gave her body but kept her soul' reverberates through the film. By the end, she's attained the transcendent spiritual dignity of Mizoguchi's Oharu."

Updates, 10/10: Salon's Andrew O'Hehir wishes he "could see the film myself with the eyes of another era, but unfortunately it doesn't change my view that Lola Montès comes off in 2008 as an enormous and creaky artifice, tough for modern viewers to 'get' without a laborious set of CliffsNotes. What was once original and confrontational about it has been swamped by later movies, and what remains seems grand and old-fashioned without being especially absorbing. Don't get me wrong: Lola Montès is a stunning visual artifact, and if you love movies you shouldn't miss it. But it's a cream cake after all; if there's still a stomach-punch in the film it's delivered by a Viennese sugar fairy."

"Lola Montès could never be confused for realism in any format: home video, theater or iPod," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "But its effectiveness as a tragedy relies on Ophüls setting out a luxurious spread for his hapless heroine."

Update, 10/13: Online listening tip. Laurence Braunberger, "the daughter of legendary New Wave producer Pierre Braunberger, who issued a limited restoration to great acclaim in 1969," is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Posted by dwhudson at October 6, 2008 12:18 PM