LE PLAISIR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 817, 25 March 1955, Page 26

LE PLAISIR

(Columbia-Max Ophuls) E PLAISIR — three short stories by Guy de Maupas-sant-bursts brilliantly upon the screen with a gay ball in Montmartre. How the music haunts us! An elegant gentleman arrives to join the dance, collapses, is carried off and found to be a tired old man in a mask, The centre-piece, "La Maison Tellier" (remember?) is longer: it begins at Madame’s house-a house of a certain kind-which the respectable regulars find closed one night, journeys with Madame and the ladies into the country for the first communion of a niece, ends with the joyous homecoming. Finally, in Maupassant’s most disillusioned vein, a young artist falls in love with a model, lives with her, parts from her and has a tragic reunion. Whatever the advertisements may say, Le Plaisir is not another La Ronde, even though it has the same director. The flavour here is different-disillusioned tather than gaily cynical in the first and last pieces and-if you can accept the context of time and place-really rather charming in the story of Madame Tellier

and her flock. All this is underlined in a more than usually effective narration by Peter Ustinov as a sort of ghost Maupassant who is heard but not seen. As for those who are both heard and seen, the film assembles a cast that is to say the least impressive. Among them you'll recognise old friends in Danielle Darrieux as Madame Rosa, Daniel Gelin and Simone Simon as the couple in "Le Modéle," and Jean Gabin, who will warm your heart as the farmer in "La Maison Tellier." Everyone who saw an earlier piece of filmed Maupassant, Jean Renoir’s Partie de Campagne-the story, as Richard Winnington put it, of everybody’s lost love-will compare that with the country scenes from "La Maison Tellier" and probably agree that Max Ophuls also has captured the rural settings beautifully: parts of the train journey and the drive in the cart are visual poetry. Yet, oddly enough, the only time I found my interest flagging briefly was in this rural interlude. A little too long at the church perhaps? Still, it’s beautifully rounded ‘off by the return to town; and, after all, the very brevity of the pieces that come before and after probably makes their mood and interest easier to sustain. The first of these is brilliant; so is the film’s

ending. Among the smaller touches here I liked especially the musical theme from the first story re-introduced over the second to last sequence as part of the story; and since that reminds me as well of the long camera movement up the stairs that immediately follows, I might as well say here what has been floating

through my mind since I began, that the use made of the moving camera throughout the film is the most consistently exciting I can remember having seen-it gives the whole work a wonderful flow. Yes, without a doubt M. Ophuls is one of the most stylish directors working in films today,