Critics reviews

Ophüls ennobles the material; those interested in pleasure should watch for the old man's blank mask peeled off as his evening ends; the lighthouse flickering in darkness as lonely townspeople gather on the shore; one woman's hat; another man's cart; and the stairs shakily mounted by a would-be suicide.

The second story, about a group of prostitutes who take one day off to attend a communion in the country, is a fantasy based on world-weariness (as unlikely as that sounds), where the pleasure in question is a brief vacation from vice, a minor exercise in virtue made magical by the characters' recognition of how rare it is in their lives; but to label this scene "bittersweet" is to deny the remarkable level of self-awareness in the women, who are among the most wonderful in Ophüls' body of work.

Le Plaisir illustrates not merely Ophüls's unparalleled sense of flow and texture, but also his proto-feminism... In a society built on the oppression of a gender, where pleasure is not only ephemeral but one-sided, Ophüls says, female assertion can only erupt through such dreadful acts of revolt. "Life is movement," but, as the narrator can only conclude, "Happiness is no lark."

On the whole, the film falls below the level of the work that surrounds it, La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de . . . , but it unmistakably belongs to Ophuls's postwar period, one of the most extraordinary creative peaks in film history.