"La Ronde" is a Fancifull, Elegant Tale of Love and Art

Max Ophuls's adaptation of the Arthur Schnitzler's Austrian play La Ronde is shot with a vivid, hallucinatory quality. Ophuls seems less concerned with the plays investigation of sex and love and more interested in the very nature of storytelling itself. He adds a self-aware ringmaster, the Raconteur (Anto Walbrook -- relishing every moment on screen), who keeps popping up in various roles, nudging the story to its necessary ends and making sly, postmodernist commentary on the narrative unfolding (as well as the very role of the medium itself in telling it). The new emphasis turns the story into one about cyclicality, inevitability, and the artifice of stories. Ophuls' lighting choices and camera movements turn the world the characters inhabit into a trance induced, dream-like place. Despite this there are moments of startlingly true-to-life realism (at times painfully real) that flit past the calculated gauziness that break through in the characters' extended monologues -- especially between a long suffering married couple long past their romantic golden years -- that form the core of the story.   

Grade: A