"Madame de..." (1953)

The french: famed for a certain affinity for materialism, who invoke from it a spiritual propensity. We are, after all, flesh ornaments for the spirit. The affinity of Madame de..., for earrings. Ostentatious objects made dull & odious by the husband acquire radiance in the hands of a forbidden lover. Vittorio de Sica plays the lover. Charles Boyer plays the husband. Danielle Darrieux plays the nameless comtesse: as lovely & inscrutable as Empson's 3rd type of ambiguity. Two lovers fundamentally opposed - the husband is a french general, and the lover an italian diplomat - who in the mind of a torn-in-half Comtesse achieve consilience in a single metaphor: the glimmering coveted earrings of Madame de...
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A woman without a name, a charming woman. An unsolvable mystery that - but a lady nonetheless. A lady of the french literary mold, she understands the value of jewelry, of effeminacies, of furs, gowns, & knicknacks: they become her, dissemble the core of her, which is in actuality a mirror, a polished gleaming surface. As her husband - a master of disguises himself - confesses to her, "We are only superficially superficial." The maturity of a french mind evinces itself in the depth perceivable, at last, in a once murky surface: the proustian surface of depth, in which ornamentation transforms our self-awareness.
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Vittorio de Sica, who has acted in more movies than he has made himself, looks like a handsomer, taller, more charismatic Scorcese. If Scorcese was handsomer & taller, he'd probably be more charismatic: he'd probably be de Sica.
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de Sica, under the influence of Max Ophuls - the director's director - makes Terminal Station, in which a married woman 'commits an indiscretion' with a lover, initiated & consummated at a station in Rome. Incidentally, Vittorio de Sica's character in Madame de... meets Madame de... at a customs station, in which one may say their lives cross, destined to terminate in that peculiar fatalism of adult high romance. Terminal Station was wrapped & released in 1953, the same year de Sica acted in Madame de... (and already after his reputation as a film director had been sealed with those films he is honored for).
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Can an object soak up a soul, as they do in witchcraft? Certainly, if love were the narcotic. Madame de... bears no name, needs none, because she is possessed by her earrings. She is no more, no less than the sumptuousness of her body gestures, her level-eyed glances of simultaneous fatigue & amorousness, & her secret superficially-superficial prayers to the Virgin, who looks down upon her with an indecipherable visage.
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Another of Napoleon's maxims: "The only victory in love is to flee." Hence, the fatalism of those who seek love, who indeed long for its death and the candle that faintly burns at the altar of the sacred Virgin, unrequited.
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Who is Max Ophuls? After this film, still unknown: the hand that erases its own trace; only the camera's self-awareness left behind like a watch in a beach, designed by the unknown watchman: like a machine that speaks but cannot tell the secret of its consciousness, only that it exists, that it perceives, something like Emerson's gallivanting all-eye let loose on the world of boudoirs & galas & salons & boutiques. We know a few facts: Ophuls was of german stock, naturalised & educated as a frenchman; a supreme & compassionate director of women; the supreme architect of the tracking shot. We know, or we can try to explain, what he can do; but to analyse the personality of the watchmaker, or the emotions of the mirrorsetter? We may as well surmise Madame de...'s real name: we may as well stare into her partly lidded eyes and chance upon the oddly comforting look of bereavement dawning at their tender corner.