Short Take: The Earrings of Madame de...

Max Ophüls’ 1953 film The Earrings of Madame de… is an exquisitely made romantic tragedy. In Belle Époque France, the spendthrift high-society wife (Danielle Darrieux) of an army general (Charles Boyer) finds herself in debt. To pay off her creditors, she sells the diamond earrings he gave her years earlier as a wedding gift. After she covers for their absence by claiming they were lost or stolen, her jeweler, fearful of a scandal for his business, tells the husband of the sale. He is sanguine, and he repurchases the earrings as a going-away present for his mistress, who is leaving Paris for Constantinople. The mistress sells the earrings in Constantinople after losing her money gambling. They are then bought on a whim by an Italian diplomat (Vittorio De Sica). He takes them with him to Paris, where he meets the wife. The two fall in love. He makes a gift of the earrings to her. She accounts for their return by telling her husband she found them in her opera gloves. This first part of the story is a light-on-its-feet farce. Ophüls creates a relaxed atmosphere in the lavish setting with extraordinarily fluid staging and camerawork. The montage of ballroom dances in which the wife and the diplomat fall in love is especially impressive. The dances, which take place over several weeks, are so deftly edited together that it feels they occur in a single take. The movements of the camera, the two dancing, and the dancers around them combine to create a swooning quality. One can’t also help but admire how smoothly Ophüls shifts the tone from farce to tragedy in the film’s second half. His three leads all give fine performances, but the transition seems most enabled by the calm assurance of the filmmaking's flamboyance. The story never gets lost in the style, though. Ophüls builds the drama to a devastating ending, topped off with a moment of redemption from the wife. One may want to go back and savor Ophüls’ filmmaking mastery scene by scene in the way one returns to the better paragraphs of the finest prose writers. But part of the elegance being enjoyed is how effectively the story is told. The screenplay, adapted from a novel by Louise de Vilmorin, is credited to Marcel Achard, Ophüls, and Annette Wadamant. The marvelous sets were designed by Jean d’Eaubonne. The costumers were Georges (Yury) Annenkov and Rosine Delamare. Christian Matras was the cinematographer.