La Ronde (Max Ophüls, 1950)

"Sophistication" and "urbanity" are threatening to become overused watchwords in my discussion of Max Ophüls' cinema, but how else to characterize this remarkable adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's 1897 theatrical roundelay? One of the most sexually frank plays of modernism's early period, La Ronde employed heterosexual assignations in order to examine European class relations, in particular the way that rigid hierarchies were starting to erode. Sexual desire is the great leveler, and this was part of why Schnitzler's play was so scandalous to its contemporary audiences. While numerous commentators over the years have observed that La Ronde's chained sequence of serial coitus was, in part, a wry demonstration of the transmission of STDs (specifically syphilis), the transgression of an earlier class order was certainly contagion enough.

By using the carousel as a metaphor, Ophüls literalizes the sexual trajectory from up to down, high and low, as the fuck-go-round thrusts its way through time. Soldiers sleep with sex workers; actresses sleep with barons; married couples slip outside of their social circles for illicit sex. Through it all, an omniscient narrator / monstrator (Anton Walbrook) negotiates these couplings like pure narrative terrain. It's not only that he refrains from judgment. He is outside of the sociological categories and mores that would render judgment possible. He's not a god or an angel; while he sometimes displays the bearing of a Caligari-like mountebank, he is really a force that orchestrates La Ronde from beyond the diegesis. (At one point, we see him in a sterile, metaphysical projection room, snipping a sex scene right out of the celluloid -- a bracing Vertovian moment in a film that, in all other respects, has no time for austerity.)

The drifting, swirling camerawork, one of Ophüls' trademarks, has a very specific thematic function here. Ophüls is quite literally "squaring the circle" by visually articulating a space that not only exemplifies the contrived circularity of these affairs. It almost impels the characters, thrusting them into each other's arms, as if by centripetal force. If I really cogitated on it, there is most likely a Lacanian undercurrent here, pertaining to the sex drive as an unconscious pulsion that, while ostensibly invisible and interior, actually generates the very universe in which we live. That's to say, our most fundamental urges, which polite society demands that we keep behind closed doors, are in fact the primal architect of the society that surrounds us.

Related sidenote: Schnitzer was apparently contacted by his Viennese contemporary Sigmund Freud, who told Schnitzler that he had accomplished in poetic drama what he had struggled to disclose through psychoanalysis. (Read more about it.)