Jean-Luc Godard once called Le Plaisir the greatest film made in France since the liberation. That's high complement indeed, but high complements and Max Ophüls tend to go hand in hand.

Historical Background: Max Ophüls was born Max Oppenheimer on May 6th, 1902, in Saarbrucken, Germany, near the French border. His father was a German-Jewish businessman, in the garment industry. With the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930's, Ophüls (a stage name he took to avoid embarrassing his parents) found himself moving about more than he might otherwise have chosen. Ophüls directed just three feature films (most notably the Bartered Bride) before fleeing to France in 1933 with his wife Hilde Wall, who he had met while directing plays at Vienna's Burgtheater. During the rest of the thirties, Ophüls made films in France, Italy, and the Netherlands, honing his skills and his preferences for graceful camera movements, long shots, and opulent sets. His films during this period included Une Histoire d'Amour (1933), Divine (1935), The Tender Enemy (1936), and Werther (1938).

When France fell in 1940, Ophüls quickly removed his family to Switzerland and thence to Hollywood, arriving there in 1941. In Hollywood, he found himself relegated to the role of director for hire. His first several projects all ended inconsequentially, with either his removal as director or the project being abandoned. After getting his bearings, however, Ophüls (working under the name "Opuls") finally completed four American films: The Exile (1947), Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), Caught (1949), and Reckless Moment (1949). By the end of this period, Ophüls had elevated his style to a plane approaching perfection.

After his move back to France in 1950, Ophüls generated the four films that would become the pinnacles of his oeuvre: La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953), and Lola Montès (1955). Ophüls died suddenly in 1957, after a bout with rheumatic heart disease, leaving behind a son, Marcel Ophüls, who later took up directing himself (The Sorrow and the Pity (1971)).

Ophüls's great strengths as a filmmaker included unprecedented skill at directing mise-en-scene, choreography of characters, and camera movement. The camera in an Ophüls's film moves with uncanny fluidity and grace and his sets are typically opulent. These characteristics are readily evident in the current film, Le Plaisir.

The Story: Le Plaisir is structured as a pontmanteau film (small anthology), being composed of three short stories, loosely tied together by the common theme of pleasure. For my VHS version (distributed by Timeless Video, Inc.), the order of the three segments was The Mask, The Model, and The Tellier House. From reading other reviews, I gather that the more usual order of presentation finds The Tellier House nestled between the other two shorter segments. Peter Ustinov narrates the English version of the film.

The Mask opens on a gaudy ballroom scene in which young aristocrats are partying wildly. A man wearing a mask arrives and begins to dance furiously, but after a few minutes he passes out from the exertion. A doctor (Claude Dauphin), who is in attendance at the dancehall, is summoned to tend to the unconscious reveler. Meanwhile, the manager of the dancehall (Paul Azais) urges the other guests to ignore the hullabaloo and to continue partying. When the man's mask is removed, he is the gray-haired Ambroise (Jean Galland), an aging inveterate womanizer, a good deal older than the other dancers. The doctor escorts him home, where the man's wife (Gaby Morlay) explains her husband's inability to let go of his younger years, when he was much admired by young women. She had hoped that he would become a bit wiser as his hair grayed, but no such luck.

In the second segment, The Model, Jean (Daniel Gélin), a painter, is much taken with a model, Joséphine (Simone Simon), and begs her to pose for him. The two are soon head-over-heels in love and passionately preoccupied with one another. Later, however, as the bloom of passion fades, the couple begins to bicker and Jean yearns for his freedom. Jean finally splits, leaving behind a farewell note and some money, despite Joséphine's insistence that she would kill herself if he ever left her. She tracks him down at the house of a friend (Jean Servais) and, after some theatrics, responds to his dare by jumping out an upper story window. She survives the fall but is permanently crippled and Jean, feeling great pangs of remorse, agrees to marry her. The segment ends with Jean pushing Joséphine along a beach in her wheelchair as two men look on, commenting on the apparent unhappiness of the couple.

The third story is the piece de resistance, comprising nearly 70 minutes of the film's total 94 minutes length. In a small town near Paris, the local brothel is the bulwark of the community's social structure, allowing for the dissipation of pent-up frustrations of the men folk, from the seamen to the town's community leaders. The very respectable Madame Tellier (Madeleine Renaud), operates the facility, having assumed full responsibility after the early death of her husband. Downstairs is a bar operated by Frédéric, a dark, lanky waiter. There, two round-hipped vixens, Louise (Mathilde Casadesus) and Flora (Ginette Leclerc), cater to the needs of the common sailors. Upstairs, the classier clientele are handled by Fernande (Paulette Dubost), who plays the part of an innocent country girl, Raphaële (Mila Parély), who represents the mysteries of the orient, and Rosa (Danielle Darrieux), who drinks and sings more than she should.

These ladies of the night maintain the harmony of the town – until they close up shop for a day for a trip to the country. It seems that Madame Tellier's niece, Constance (Jocelyne Jany), is to receive her First Communion and her parents, Joseph (Jean Gabin) and Marie (Héléne Manson) Rivet, have invited Madame Tellier to join them in celebrating the event. After all, Joseph has heard that his sister is doing very well. Her employees are also invited. Back in town, fistfights break out among the sailors and a whole slew of new animosities arise among the stalwarts of the community.

In the countryside, the Madame and her whores learn to pass as respectable young ladies, though several of the gals suffer insomnia from the rarity of sleeping alone without have been rogered multiple times, during the evening. Rosa's tension is only put to rest when she discovers Constance crying, having been displaced from her usual location in her mother's bed, and invites the child to join her (innocently) in her own bed in a closet under the stairs. In the morning, the country community is vastly impressed with the number of fine relatives that Joseph Rivet has been able to muster for his daughter's First Communion. The town's mayor is beside himself to give up his pew for the lovely Rivet relatives. One by one, the gals are reduced to weeping at the purity of the Communion ceremony, though the Jewish girl quite naturally holds out the longest. Later, as the Rivet family celebrates with a feast, Joseph, having had a bit too much to drink, is beside himself with desire to "thank" the young ladies properly for coming. He wants to thank Rosa in particular, but his watchful and wise sister intervenes to prevent a family disaster.

Hurrying to catch the 3:30 train back home, the young women still find enough time to wander through the high grass of a meadow to pick lovely bouquets of wild flowers. En route back to town, the young prostitutes begin to revert to form, especially after a garter salesman, Julien Ledentu (Pierre Brasseur), joins them in their cabin, urging them to try on his goods. Madame Tellier finally has to throw the randy man off the train, after they pass through a particularly long and dark tunnel.

As the ladies arrive back in town, word spreads quickly through the male portion of the community that order has been restored. Flowers are strewn about liberally, champagne corks popped, and testosterone levels duly returned to normal. The mayor (René Blancard) and the former mayor (Antoine Balpêtré), the banker's son (Robert Lombard) and the insurance agent (Jean Meyer), and the other pillars of the community hurry round. Even Monsieur Tourneveau (Louis Seigner), the married fishmonger, usually limited to Saturday nights at the brothel, finds an excuse (a boat supposedly lost at sea) to get out of his own house and down to Tellier's brothel.

Themes: This movie's central theme is the titular one: pleasure and how the pursuit of it can sometimes rule or ruin our lives. What we have in Le Plaisir is a kind of adult fairytale, with the usual moral plug. We must learn to manage our cravings for pleasure, lest they destroy us. My personal view is that the only kind of life more meaningless than one devoted exclusively to the pursuit of pleasure is one devoted exclusively to the suppression of pleasure. I'm not a fan of the Catholic notions of guilt and repression. Tragedy in life emanates from extremes. The need for gratification and the need to avoid pain are two of the most basic operations in the human brain. The brain's so-called reward system, activated by food, fluid, sexual gratification, and certain drugs, reinforces whatever behaviors were active when the reward was obtained. The so-called punishment system, on the other hand, responds to physical or emotional pain and suppresses causative behaviors. What Ophüls is illustrating through his film is three kinds of problems that can develop in relation to our impulse for pleasure.

In the first segment, Ambroise's problem is that he has an excessively narrow range of activities from which he derives pleasure. If, for example, one depends exclusively on food intake as a source of pleasure, the inevitable result is obesity. If one depends mainly on a euphoria-producing drug, the inevitable result will be addiction. If one depends excessively on sex or the flattering attentions of attractive young persons of one gender or the other, then one will ultimately transform pathetically into an aging lothario. One is best served by learning to take pleasure in as wide a range of activities as possible so that any one is replaceable, as health considerations or stage-of-life considerations require. We also note, in this segment, the idle wealthy so preoccupied with their passions that they are unable to observe and meditate on what is transpiring around them.

In the second segment, pleasure in the relationship between Jean and Joséphine is excessively dependent on the passionate element alone, especially for Jean. When that fades, there is too little of substance (i.e., affection, love) in the relationship to sustain Jean's interest. After Joséphine's suicide attempt leaves her permanently incapacitated, Jean's remorse takes over as his chief motivation. Remorse is a function of the punishment system. Jean feels compelled to marry and care for Joséphine; otherwise he'll feel the pain of guilt, emanating from his punishment system. Jean's life is now driven mainly by avoidance of pain, a state that he reached because he failed to adequately manage his desires for pleasure. A life driven mainly by avoidance of guilt is a bleak life indeed and we see how unhappy and pathetic the life of Jean and Joséphine has become. Pleasure and suffering are interrelated to the extent that unbridled callous pursuit of pleasure will ultimately activate remorse and suffering.

In the film's main segment, we see men and whores mutually dependent on the pleasures afforded by the brothel. Both the customers and the prostitutes are addicted to the daily relationships. Forced to go without for a day, the men become moody and irritable; the gals experience insomnia and a understandable nostalgia for the "purity" of the country life. Both groups are suffering what we would call withdrawal symptoms were they using drugs instead of non-connubial sex as their daily fixes. The problem lies not in taking pleasure where one can; it lies in becoming so dependent on one particular form of pleasure that its loss becomes irreplaceable.

Ophüls might also be drawing an analogy between sex and movie going. Both are a kind of escapist pleasure-taking. One doesn't usually think in terms of a person developing an addiction to cinema, though I'm perhaps not one to comment on that possibility, given that I've written some 500 films reviews in the last seventeen months! I'm not genuinely worried, however, since I also take joy in a number of other aspects of my life.

The narrator concludes, near the film's end, "happiness is not a lark." Depending too much on basic gratification of drives as one's source of pleasure is fraught with dangers. We can avoid those dangers by such devices as deepening and broadening our sources of pleasure, sublimating drives into productive activities, and using our pleasure-taking as self-reward for progress on tasks. These more sophisticated methods of pleasure-taking offer the advantage of sustainability.

Production Values: This film triptych by Ophüls was based on three short stories by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1894), a novelist and arguably the all-time greatest French purveyor of short stories. (De Maupassant also received cinematic adaptations from Jean Renoir for A Day in the Country (1930) and from Jean-Luc Godard for Masculine-Feminine (1966)). The three specific stories chosen by Ophüls were not in any sense grouped together by their author, so the linking of the three under the overarching rubric of "pleasure" was Ophüls's concept. Ophüls's cinematic renditions of the stories are more faithful than not, at least with respect to details of the stories. What Ophüls altered was the overall perspective, conveyed through the stories. Indeed, he could not do otherwise. Ophüls's outlook on life and toward the people one encounters in life was markedly different than that of de Maupassant. De Maupassant, who emerged from Flaubert's literary group after an education at Yvetot and Rouen, had a bitter and acerbic style featuring sarcasm and a preoccupation with man's cruelty to man. Ophüls, by contrast, had a liberal sympathy for his fellow man and especially for the downtrodden and unhappy. So, for example, the prostitutes who are fat, coarse, ugly, and hypocritical in de Maupassant's short story are attractive in the movie (a couple are downright gorgeous) and treated sympathetically by Ophüls. Ophüls probably understood, as well, that movie goers aren't especially interested in the lives of coarse, ugly whores. The desperation of the male pillars of the community, when the brothel is closed for a day, is treated satirically by de Maupassant but with gentle humor by Ophüls. Since my values in relation to "pleasure" are more in keeping with those of Ophüls than those of de Maupassant, I view the filmed version as an improvement on the original. Others might disagree. I see no great hypocrisy in the whores weeping in church or the father of the girl who receives communion wanting to shag one of the girl's makeshift "aunts-for-a-day." All of that is simply the complexity and the ambivalence of human nature. In my eyes, Ophüls creates delicate poetry when, for example, he sympathetically juxtaposes the prostitutes against a field of wild flowers.

Though there is substance enough in this film, Ophüls is a master of style more than substance. There's a plethora of graceful pans throughout Le Plaisir that drink in the opulent backgrounds. There's a few especially breathtaking sequences, such as the first-person depiction of the suicide attempt in the second segment and the graceful pan up the outside of Madame Tellier's establishment, as we become peeping Toms, eyeing the activities inside. Like their customers, we become acquainted with the prostitutes only from an exterior vantage point, never really gaining access to their minds or their souls. The musical soundtrack nicely complements the décor, camera movements, lovely ladies, and superb frame composition to yield a pleasing whole. There's that pleasure motif again!

There's a lot of talent in the film's cast, though no one character has enough of the overall package to really shine. None disappoint, which is really all you can demand in an ensemble piece of this kind. Madeleine Renaud provides possibly the most impressive performance of the film as Madame Tellier. Ginette Leclerc, who played Flora, previously appeared in The Baker's Wife (1938). Mila Parély, who played Raphaële, was in The Rules of the Game (1939) and La Belle et la Bête (1946). Danielle Darrieux, who was superbly sultry as Rosa, had roles in such films as Mayerling (1936), La Ronde (1950), Five Fingers (1952), The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953), and 8 Women (2001). Paula Dubost, who played Fernande, appeared in The Rules of the Game (1939), Lola Montès (1955), and The Last Metro (1980). Jean Gabin, who played Joseph Rivet, is a revered French actor who starred in such films as Pépé le Moko (1937), Grand Illusion (1937), La Bête Humaine (1938), Le Quai des Brumes (1938), Le Jour se lève (1939), and French Cancan (1955).

Daniel Gélin gave a splendid lead performance in The Model. His resume includes roles in La Ronde (1950), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Testament of Orpheus (1959), Murmur of the Heart (1971), and La Nuit de Varennes (1982). His co-star for the segment, Simone Simon, appeared in La Bête Humane (1938), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Cat People (1942), and La Ronde (1950). Jean Servais, Jean's friend in The Model segment, also appeared in Rififi (1954) and That Man from Rio (1964).

Bottom-Line: Taken by themselves, the two short segments of the film are nothing special. The Tellier House is very special and could stand alone, but its theme is deepened and expanded by the inclusion of the other two pieces. Overall, Le Plaisir represents an ambitious and largely successful undertaking. The narration is in English and the dialog in French with English subtitles. The overall running time is 94 minutes.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age