Certain artifacts represent the outer limits of their form — they may or may not be the best, but they’re unquestionably the most. Modern art has its “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon”; fiction has Nabokov. The classical cinema has “Lola Montès.” Watch it first, argue with me later.
I doubt I’d be making this claim based on earlier viewings of Max Ophuls’ intoxicating costume epic, butchered, faded, and transposed as it has been since it premiered to Parisian jeers in 1955.
Originally 140 minutes in length, “Lola” came to America four years later in a bowdlerized 75-minute cut; it has been working its way back toward its true self ever since.
Now it’s here, or as close as we’ll ever get. The 115-minute version newly restored from the film’s original elements returns Ophuls’ wide-screen visuals and Technicolor hues to almost sinful clarity. A DVD release is imminent, but trust me: Seen on a big screen, this is a movie to get drunk on.
Sin is the film’s subject. The lady of the title was a real historical figure (1821-61), an Irish-born Spanish dancer and courtesan whose greatest art was scandal.
When the film opens, Lola (Martine Carol) is at the end of the line: the featured attraction in a traveling show of trapeze artists and clowning dwarves.
The Circus Master (Peter Ustinov) relates her career as a series of tableaux vivant; Lola herself is the fading jewel at center stage, taking questions from the audience and receding into her own memories, pulling us along for the ride.
The film’s flashbacks erupt like hothouse orchids: Here is Lola luring composer Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg) into breakup sex; here is the soldier-lover (Ivan Desny) she stole from her mother (Lise Delamare); here are her seductions of a student (a young Oskar Werner) and an aging King Ludwig of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook).
The film constantly loops back to the metaphorical diorama of the circus, with its wheels within wheels of paying customers, circling horses, flying acrobats, and the whirligig camera. The techniques the director refined in earlier masterpieces reach their rococo apotheosis here: insanely fluid camera shots that never seem to end, frames crammed with mesmerizing bric-a-brac, a sense that all the world’s a stage and the curtain’s lowering much too fast.
Many people find Carol to be a mannequin in the leading role. Maybe she’s not an actress of dazzling gifts, but she knows that Lola’s tragedy is that everyone desires the temptress who’s not there while missing the woman who is. We want the legend, not the facts; the fantasy rather than the flesh. This understanding is what shines in the back of Lola’s eyes as she disappears beneath the press of men, and it’s what the Circus Master will always miss, even as he counts the receipts.
Along with one of the great final shots in all of movies, “Lola Montès” exudes a weariness that’s both majestic and unbearably moving. Time is the movie’s ultimate subject, and the ways we try to stop time in its tracks with love, lust, storytelling, or the sheer beauty of a woman’s neck and a camera’s pivot.
“Life is for me is a movement,” Lola says, and whether she’s talking about her heart or Ophuls is talking about his medium, this eternally rich movie refuses to make clear.
“Lola Montes: The Definitive Restoration”
Not rated. 1 hour, 55 minutes. In French with English subtitles. Directed by Max Ophuls; written by Annette Wademant based on the novel by Cecil Saint-Laurent; starring Martine Carol, Peter Ustinov, Anton Walbrook, Oskar Werner. Opens today at Starz FilmCenter.
