Critics reviews

It is set in a fin-de-siècle Europe that resembles a dollhouse come to life: Every element of the decor seems to have been fetishized before it was built. Yet unlike most historical romances, the sets don't suffocate the drama—in fact, they underscore the film’s tragic dimension.

There's a reason Ophüls's beautiful, technically astounding tracking shots are so well remembered: They embody the sadness of the simplest truth that nothing lasts, no matter how desperately we may attempt to plan for otherwise, no matter how aggressively we may try to cast ourselves as masters of our own domain.

There are some movies that are so perfect, so exquisitely beautiful, so effortlessly elegant, they're almost painful. Like watching an overwhelmingly enchanting dancer — their beauty cracks something inside of you... The pain of manipulating those graceful muscles, and in the case of Madame de..., the pain of that shambolic muscle called the heart, reveals what threatens to stain one's resplendently spotless satin and silk — blood-red, human deception and guilt.

It is perhaps no wonder that Ophuls declared that it was mainly the circulation of the earrings that interested him in the Madame de … novella by Louise de Vilmorin. Nevertheless, he gave the characters and their dilemmas, as he translated them into cinema, great psychological poignancy and complexity.

The film, beginning in the lilting superficiality of a frivolous woman looking to pawn her jewels and ending in death and the ironic sanctification of those jewels, is Ophuls at his bleakest and most beautiful. The very opulence and swirl of the world from which Madame de is ostracizing herself—the opera, the gowns, the balls, the jewels, the servants—will be stripped away as love burns through the outer layers of life. A woman is rescued from shallowness and inauthenticity, but at what a price!

More than any film I have seen in months, Ophüls' deeply rewarding film crowds its frames and extends its shots until you think you have reached the limit of visual excess—and then his story takes a turn that proves how much about these characters and this story has remained hidden from view, waiting for the right desperate or ecstatic moment in which to show entirely new facets of themselves.

The Earrings of Madame de... (1953) is a beloved period costume drama, but in terms of visceral impact and camera movement, it's an action flick. Director Max Ophuls translated emotions into not just dynamic motion but the tension between abruptly shifting speeds, rhythms and screen direction and a camera pushing to keep up. Many directors' storytelling shows all the grace of a street brawl; this fight moves like capoeira.

Evanescence is an integral part of cinema, and no other director captured it as lyrically and yet as savagely as Ophüls. His tracking, dollying, gliding camera was never more mellifluous, or his visualization of life's inexorable flow more tangible, than in The Earrings of Madame de…: The dissolving ballroom twirls between the Countess and the Baron form possibly the most graceful invocation of the passage of time ever depicted on screen...

A product of Ophüls's European homecoming, and widely regarded as his masterpiece, 1953's "The Earrings of Madame de…" expresses the ardors of love within a fluid framework of exquisite technique. Ophüls sends his attentive, ceaselessly mobile cameras through twinkling Belle Époque decor and multilevel sets, directing suavely contained performances from his actors.

Much as I admire Madame De . . ., I prefer Ophuls flawed: His mangled Hollywood weepie, the heroically masochistic Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), and his wildly ambitious and equally miscast swan song, the delirious Lola Montez (1955), bear the wounds of a losing battle with the movie system. The Earrings of Madame De . . . is miraculously unscathed. The movie is gem-hard, crystalline, and superbly impervious.

When people have asked me to name the greatest film of all time—in my humble opinion, of course—my instant answer has been unvarying for the past 30 years or so: Max Ophüls' Madame de … (1953).

As Ophüls' famously restless camera swirls through ''Madame de...,'' he traces an interior journey, from a world of bright, enchanting surfaces to the dim recesses of a soul. Madame de is ennobled as her girlish infatuation grows into an emotion that she can't control and that finally consumes her... This ending, one of the most beautiful in the movies, has no parallel in Louise de Vilmorin's novel. It is entirely Ophüls' own, and it contains the essence of his art.