So this is a movie about a married noble couple (the movie never gives us their names, cutting off dialogue or blocking nametags to prevent it, hence the “Madame de…” thing) in… 19th century(?) France. They ride around in horse-drawn carriages and get their lighting from candles that they put out with altar-boy snuffers, so I guess whenever that would have been. Their marriage is a mannered society thing; they both carry on light dalliances according to a kind of code that prevents things from getting serious enough to be scandalous, and the wife in particular seems to be somewhat of a libertine — as we see her, she’s looking for something to sell off to pay her gambling debt, and she comes upon the titular earrings, a wedding gift from her husband.

She sells them to the jeweler who sold them originally to the husband, and then later at the opera pretends to have lost them, which turns into a whole hullabaloo with theft suspected, and articles in the paper. The jeweler is nervous (because if it was a theft, uh, he has the earrings), and goes to her husband to tell the story. The husband is amused, and secretly buys the earrings back, seemingly with no real plan in mind.

Later, as his mistress is leaving town (to prevent their affair from getting too serious), he gives her the earrings as a goodbye present. She gets to Constantinople, goes gambling, and ends up losing bad enough that she has to pawn them. A random baron buys them from a jewelry store, and then hops a ship to Paris. Quite by coincidence/fate, he ends up meeting Madame de, and an affair ensues.

But the affair becomes a too-serious one — there’s a dance montage, where they keep meeting at ball after ball, and dance late into the night after everyone else has left — and Madame de decides for the sake of propriety to leave for the country to cool things down and put a stop to gossip. But the baron is too smitten, and when she won’t return his letters, he finally follows her to the country; she can’t resist him and their affair resumes. He also now gives her a present of… yep, the earrings. Normally, this would be a sort of dangerously scandalous present — a married woman can’t just go around wearing expensive diamond earrings that a rando dude bought for her, right, it’s clearly improper — but the coincidence lets her hatch a plan to wear this reminder of her lover.

Because, of course, she doesn’t know that her husband ever had them, so as far as she knows, the jeweler just sold them and the baron bought them by coincidence. So she arranges a little scene wherein she pretends to find the earrings after having “lost” them previously. The husband is of course surprised af that she has them, since last he knew, they were in Constantinople with another woman, but he can’t exactly say that part aloud… but he’s also not buying her story, because he knows she never lost them.

So he confronts the baron, to let him know that he’s not an idiot, and that this affair has gotten out of hand — with a kind of tacit admission that of course a casual affair is normal as he explains the provenance of the earrings, but come on now. The baron is chastened, and also ticked off because when the lady explained how she’d be able to wear them in public, she didn’t say “oh yeah, these were a gift from my husband before” or anything, she spun a tale about her aunt. So not only was she lying to her husband but she was lying to him too. So he coldly breaks it off with her.

And she is distraught, and starts getting all emotional about the earrings as her only trace of him, which ticks off her husband, who makes her give them as a gift to her niece (who just had a child; and who doesn’t like a nice pair of earrings when they have a newborn baby?). SHOCKINGLY, the niece sells the earrings off for cash money, and the jeweler comes back to the husband like “uh, you want to buy these AGAIN?” but ps he does not, he now hates those earrings.

But the wife hears about this, and she goes back to the jeweler, fencing off her other jewels that her husband gave her to get back this one from her lover. When the husband finds out about this, well, he’s not happy.

And there’s a conversation here, where finally, all the mannered detachment and irony breaks down, and he talks to her with weary honesty about what their relationship is, and how good lord he’s not a monster, but come on, quit trying to turn it into this grand tragedy. But she won’t have any of it, and keeps mooning over the earrings and her lost lover, so finally he goes and finds the baron, to challenge him to a duel, because fuck this.

Before the duel, they show the husband (who is a general) doing some target practice, where he gets three shots right in the heart on a practice dummy. So then it’s time to get some pistols and a doctor on site, and they have the duel. The husband will shoot first… and here we cut away to the wife, who is trying to come and see the duel (which seems like a terrible plan, but hey), but first stops at a church to bribe the saints into preserving her lover with a donation of, yep, the earrings; we then see her carriage coming close to the dueling grounds. She gets out and starts running to a vantage point, but before she can reach it, we hear a shot… and a long silence with no answering shot; she collapses (there had been a whole thing with her fainting a lot and doctors warning her of a weak heart), and her maid runs off screaming for help. Is she dead? Is her lover?

Who knows, because we’re going to cut back to the church, and instead of showing a funeral or a wedding or something, we just slowly zoom in on the pair of earrings, now with a placard saying that they were “donated by Madame de,” and movie ends.

The plot all laid out like that sounds like a total melodrama, and in the end, it is; but what makes the movie is the way that it transitions smoothly from being a mannered society movie, set in this glamorous Parisian world where all the emotions are superficial and meaningless, to becoming this story about a passionate love and loss and tragic maybe-death set in the countryside as often as not. Watching the characters each at separate times start losing their polished surface and become rougher and realer is the core of this movie. It’s probably well-placed on the list, but worthy of being on it.

(And… that’s the last one! Wrap-up post to come.)