"Lola Montes" (1955)

Ophuls' only color film, and his last. How appropriate. By no means is it Ophuls' masterpiece (as some may believe), yet it is perhaps the one film which summarizes Ophuls' oeuvre like no other. Not because it is his last but because it is his most achingly nostalgic (and maybe this resulted from the secret knowledge that it would be his last). A film about the past through the eyes of spectacle. In Technicolor of course. Thesis: Past is always Spectacle, and its heroine remains mute with the loves that she experienced, which speak for her. She is the object of desire, made obscure by over-exposure. Paradox. Even when she appears, quite early in the film, after a complex circus mise-en-scene (directed by Peter Ustinov's character, who stands in for Ophuls), she appears like only an incidental feature, an ornamentation, of a larger scheme: she is the small bud at the center of the flower, its petals covering and uncovering her in a heavy wind of history. She is the prism through which Europe marches on its way toward the 20th century, toward a modernity of images and cults: like a relic from the age of courtesans, her appeal is one fated to wither with the 19th century and all its pseudo-classical inheritances. She counts Franz Lizst and King Ludwig I of Bavaria as her lovers: they are central figures in retrospect, but to Lola Montes they too had to stand in line and wait their turn. She is the Casanova of the 19th -- she gave her body to posterity, and chose the cinema (by way of the circus and the magic lantern) as her burial place, that we may see her in the flesh of Martine Carol. Like Rita Hayworth had done for Welles' The Lady from Shanghai -- dye her famed scarlet hair blonde -- Martine Carol, a blonde who Hitchcock would have approved of, dyed her hair dark, nearly raven-black. Not simply because the historical Lola Montez was a dark brunette, but also because Ophuls knew that her eyes would shine like jewels this way. We are thankful that she hardly ever looks at us directly -- the blindness to come!