劳拉·蒙特斯

To speak the unspeakable --

1. On history and movement:
“Life for me is . . . a movement,” says the movie’s Lola. “My life is whirling in my head,” she frets. Few would have been surprised if Ophuls—the bard of pictorial motion, whose camera doesn’t simply permit us to see but rather, like an enthusiastic friend, pulls us into the whirl of life—had made those statements about himself. Yet his Lola is far removed from history’s spitfire dervish. If Lola Montès is a film infatuated with motion, its heroine is often a study in motion denied. This is nothing like a conventional movie biography. It is, instead, a profound meditation on the presumptions and limitations of all biography. So much has been written about the director’s virtuosity that relatively little is said about his scrupulous treatment of truth, power, gender, compromise, the selling of the self.

2. On objectification:
Carol, however, turned out to be a blessing, though admittedly this is a minority view. Her stony beauty encouraged Ophuls to objectify Lola in a way that would not have been possible with a more expressive actor. This is a film that is often intent on keeping its emotional distance. In transforming the immodestly blonde Carol into a corseted brunette, Ophuls created an image surprisingly close to portraits of the real Lola, while emphasizing the cryptic nature of sexual allure. Had he been able to hire Gina Lollobrigida, he might have given us the spider dance Lola; with Danielle Darrieux, Jeanne Moreau, or Ingrid Bergman, he might have given us a contemplative, flirtatious, commanding Lola. With Carol, he presents Lola as a prisoner of sex, and draws a cinematic line—a tracking shot, of course—between the waxen object of our curiosity and her unknowable interior life.

The real Montez gave lectures, receiving a higher fee than Dickens during their respective American tours. But she never appeared in a circus or toured as a sideshow act, unlike other notorious figures, from Robert Ford to Evelyn Nesbit to the fallen stars of today’s talk show confessionals. No, the circus is Ophuls’s inspired tour de force, its skull-like claustrophobia heightened by the absence of a single shot to place it in the larger world. We enter the big top at the start, and exit when the camera forces us backward, away from the arena, at which point a curtain shuts us out. There is no outside, no reality beyond the tent and Lola’s memory.

3. On prostitution and capitalism:
The business of prostitution hovers over this film, but Ophuls makes a clear distinction between prostituting one’s body (in Ophulsian theology, a venial sin at most) and selling one’s soul (a mortal sin at least). Ophuls loves Lola, and whatever the real Lola was, his Lola is not a whore, not even a courtesan. True, she will get a palace from her Bavarian king, but the film depicts theirs as a genuine love match. Elsewhere, sex is a means of escape or an escapade in pleasure. Money does not change hands. Not until she descends, in the ringmaster’s phrase, “from kingdom to carnival,” sacrificing sexual independence and the possibility of love (however fleeting) for the commerce of show business, does she put herself on the market.

Ophuls had nothing against whores; he treats them with humor and respect in La ronde and Le plaisir. He was, however, impatient with soulless capitalism, as in his early Dutch film Comedy of Money, in which a singing ringmaster explicates corruption in the market. By 1955, Ophuls had endured his own experience with ballyhoo in Hollywood, and it is tempting to see Lola as a fragile artiste at the mercy of the machinations of callous producers.

4. On feminist autonomy and power:
By beginning the flashback sequences with Liszt, the film establishes Lola as an adventuress with celebrity connections while showing that, far from being on the make, she possesses a mature sense of love’s labors and the tussle for power that is the price of emancipation—an issue played out repeatedly as she flees her mother, her husband, and Bavarian mobs. The ringmaster will later tell her: “Talent doesn’t interest me . . . only power and efficiency.”

For Ophuls’s purposes, the student shows that Lola dispenses her favors freely and inspires fierce loyalty, representing to the fraternal revolutionaries “love, freedom, everything [the conservatives] detest!”

Ophuls will not let us see Lola dance—neither her unsuccessful audition (her maid remarks, “As always, they didn’t like the bolero”) nor her royal performance (we see the king tapping his fingers in time); nor do we get to see her illustrious breasts (we get extended business about finding a needle and thread to sew up her ripped bodice). But Lola is no longer a waxen figure! The Lola who on the Riviera dashed to confront her lover’s wife now predominates, as she gallops to meet the king, and charms him with a single step of a Spanish fandango—no more than a pose, really.

5. On success and worthiness:
The sixth and final movement is itself a circus trick. Lola, a ghost of her former self, must perform the climax of her act, which we learn she has been doing for an astonishing four months—astonishing because even a top acrobat in the best of health would have trouble diving from a high-wire platform onto an object no larger than a mattress. This, we are told, she has done show after show without a net. Lola is dizzy, wavering, colorless; she has no more chance of surviving her fall than Scottie does his in the preamble to Vertigo. But, of course, she does survive, promptly resurrected as a captive in the menagerie, selling kisses for a dollar, pimped out to the end. Yet can anyone doubt that Lola remains triumphant, an object of veneration for all trusting suckers everywhere, including Max Ophuls, who believed that character is a kind of talent? His camera tracks back for a hundred glorious seconds before he allows the curtain to be drawn, leaving Lola in peace, or at least enjoying the bliss of celebrity homage, until, once more, we hit “Play” and return to the big top.

6. On the film itself:
It was as if Orson Welles had made a movie of Camille with Betty Grable in the lead, but with all the intricate flashbacks, visual pyrotechnics and distancing ironies of Citizen Kane.

影片主要内容有两段：一段是少女萝拉拒绝嫁给年老的伯爵，让她父亲的副官娶她，但婚后她的丈夫追逐别的女人，她毅然离开他，开始了独立自由的生活。另一段是萝拉到巴伐利亚去演出，被国王爱上，与国王在一起的一段生活。后来萝拉为了国王的王权安全，毅然离开巴伐利亚。萝拉是那个时代不甘被命运摆布的女子，但最后却不得不在马戏团里像一只动物一样被人驱使赚钱。影片结尾，萝拉被关在笼子里，让观众排队去抚摸和亲手，马戏团对观众每人收取1块钱。她遭受的耻辱令人感同身受。

       巴洛克式的古典主义的繁重，在一个不甘于向命运妥协的悲剧人物身上，隐喻出欧洲的落寞之感，最后共鸣于悲观的存在主义。
    讲究的场面调度，深焦摄影，宽银幕在单幅的画面上叙事信息量和视觉信息量都有提升，从最外在提升了影片的节奏感。巴洛克的繁复和形式的美感从内而外流露。
    但是如此高的资金投入，所回馈的视觉饕鬄盛宴，我认为还欠缺更多。
    在剧作上，劳拉蒙特斯这个人物具不具有可塑造的必要性，典型性。人物鲜明与否。在塑造人物，由人物产生的悲剧共鸣中，对环境的塑造有没有到位。劳拉蒙特斯个人认为不是一个典型性的人物，从人物的剧作塑造上特别一般，因为父亲的战死家庭没落，母亲淫荡，和母亲中意的副官结婚，婚后追寻芭蕾舞，其中有若干个情人，得到了权利的巅峰，最后没落于美国的大马戏团。在剧作的环境场景塑造上，人物缺乏内涵，人物内在的实质空洞，人物缺乏环境的推动力，人物缺乏内在的戏剧性，人物经历太过于俗气。
    古典主义，有古典主义叙事的狭隘，若拍摄时注重人物的表现，注重一定的渲染，这个电影也许走的更远，至少，我觉得劳拉梦特斯和安娜卡列尼娜，战争与和平那种电影里的人物缺乏大气。
    视觉上的冲击力做的还是蛮不错的。单幅画面达到叙事能量的最大是很好的教学材料。对称的美感，布景和色调对叙事的推动......