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A “sophisticated” film even by the standards of cinema’s most rarified fake nobleman: a few decades after the Napoleonic wars, spendthrift society woman Danielle Darrieux is married to French general Charles Boyer and flirts, with diminishing detachment, with Italian diplomat Vittorio De Sica. It’s a film of surfaces: the first shot surveys the overflowing contents of Darrieux’s closet before alighting on her reflection, and the characters speak in tastefully counterfeit emotions. But, as Ophüls’s gliding camera traps the proceedings in amber, and as those earrings function as the currency of emotional transactions, it’s clear that Boyer has it right when he says they’re only “superficially superficial.”
Opens March 16 at Film Forum
Opens March 16 at Film Forum
