For Colorado Public Radio
Review of “Lola Montes” – Max Ophuls

HOST:

           The 1955 movie “Lola Montes,” made in France by German-Jewish director Max Ophuls (OH-fuls) was a total flop when it first came out. But over the years, it’s reputation has grown, and it’s now been restored to its orig inal length and legendary color. Colorado Public Radio film critic Howie Movshovitz says that while the film may not have succeeded in the fifties, its enticing package makes it certainly a film for our time.

REVIEW:

          Director Max Ophuls is one of the most deceptive filmmakers. He’s not obscure, but the surfaces of his films are so beautiful that it’s easy to become entranced, and then you may not notice that Ophuls doesn't simply present beauty, he uses it. The surface of “Lola Montes” overwhelms the senses, even the credits. Ophuls opens the film with gold script against a rich blue background – on a wide CinemaScope screen. The story begins in a circus in perhaps the 1850s. Chandeliers with candles descend towards the floor of the circus; two lines of young women in red and orange make way for a ringmaster in white pants topped by maroon tails with deep pink satin sleeves. The ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) strides around the circus followed by a camera that swoops and circles. It’s the deep physical thrill of the circus opening. It takes you right out of yourself, but what’s also going on for Max Ophuls and this movie is that it’s all completely artificial.

The circus centers on one attraction. Lola Montes (Martine Carol) is a scandalous woman, and the ringmaster promises to tell the entire story of her exploits and her famous love affairs. While she sits and listens, the ringmaster announces that Lola Montes will answer any questions from the audience, although he either dismisses the questions as they come, or answers them himself. Lola remains silent.

          The story of her life takes the film outdoors. A carriage drawn by horses moves slowly through the mountains of northern Italy, en route to Rome. The carriage belongs to the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, Lola’s lover at the moment. Her own carriage follows, because Lola never wants to be controlled by her men; she always has her own means of transportation ready to go.

          There are times in “Lola Montes,” when you lose track of story. It doesn’t matter that there’s a forest or an inn, or that Lola and Liszt are sick of each other. It’s a world of pure color, like abstract painting of the mid-1950s. Even in outdoor location shots, Ophuls orchestrates color – he plays gold, red and deep blue against the greenery of the forest and the reddish color of the earth. Ophuls uses color the way musicians use notes and chords. If you put this movie up against abstract painting of the time – or a lot of the films by Stan Brakhage – it would look as if Ophuls had merely added some story to the same artistic impulse.

          Max Ophuls was making feminist movies long before most people either thought of it – or even noticed. Lola Montes has been a self-defined and self-determining woman. Now, she’s a prisoner. She’s contained by men, gawked at by men, talked about by men, and exploited by men who want to corral and domesticate her dangerous energy. For most of the movie, she’s in a cage. It may be a beautiful cage – her coach, rooms in the palace of the King of Bavaria. But near the end of the movie, Lola Montes sits inside a literal cage at the circus, like a sideshow attraction. As the ringmaster talks about her, Lola ca sts her eyes down. She’s there to be humiliated and she bears the look of an animal in the zoo who’s lost all its spirit.

          Ophuls is still one of the few filmmakers whose work proves that the CinemaScope image is good for more than explosions and combat in outer space. He fills that huge canvas with human drama and shapes it so that the viewer has to go inside the film to search around and see what’s there. In “Lola Montes” it’s open for people to see, but they have to look. You have to commit yourself to absorbing the absolute magnificence of color as a way to comprehend what that color embodies.

“Lola Montes” comes from the time just before small screens started to take over the landscape of moving visual imagery. It’s not a television, a laptop or a YouTube movie, and it won’t make any sense to people who want to text, check their email, talk on their phones and listen to other music at the same time. It’s not a movie to watch in sections. It’s a whole piece; if you want to get “Lola Montes,” give yourself to it for two hours. It’s worth it.

          I’m Howie Movshovitz