CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK     
WHAT LOLA WANTS

The exacting and sumptuous Cinémathèque Française restoration of “Lola Montès,” Max Ophüls’s last film, from 1955 (opening at Film Forum on Oct. 10), recovers not just the movie’s look but also its meaning. The romantic costume drama presents a great nineteenth-century femme fatale, a faux-Spanish danseuse and gold-digger whose lovers included Franz Liszt and King Ludwig of Bavaria. Yet Ophüls makes of her story something stunningly personal. He starts the movie where Lola (played by the thirty-five-year-old French sex symbol and scandal magnet Martine Carol) ends up: in an American circus, reënacting her adventures. Her passions burned out, her money gone, her earlier days of wildness recurring to her in flashbacks, she has become a celebrity, a precursor to a movie star. The movie is a colossal spectacle about colossal spectacles, and the extravagant palette, the cavernous sets, and the wide-screen images in which Ophüls entombs Lola (and Carol) contrast cruelly with the real-life pathos of the performers, whom the director’s own magnificent artistry cannot help but exploit as well as celebrate. ♦