Le Plaisir

Director: Max Ophuls

1952 / 97min / DCP

Ophuls’s penultimate film, much admired by Stanley Kubrick, is a triptych in which each section is drawn from a Guy de Maupassant story (the “author,” voiced by Jean Servais, narrates), with its longer, altogether more ebullient central section, depicting the madam of a small-town brothel shepherding her girls to her niece’s First Communion, bookended by briefer and rather more melancholy tales that illustrate “pleasure” as something very distinct from happiness. Madeleine Renaud, Simone Simon, Jean Gabin, and Danielle Darrieux are but a few of the immortals of French cinema invited to dance with Ophuls’s ever-on-the-move camera in this rich, wise film, so terribly Gallic in its weary fatalism you might forget that it was made by a German.

Distributor: Janus Films

Part of Max Ophuls: Motion Within Motion