So I described this movie to my wife as “a French romantic tragedy, probably.” I said that knowing nothing about it other than a) the title, and b) that Max Ophuls also directed The Earrings of Madame de…, which (as I alluded to in my write-up of Charulata), is a rich person relationship drama/tragedy.

As it happens, I was two-thirds right about this movie: It is a romance, it is a tragedy, but it’s not French. Turns out that Ophuls (whose real name is Oppenheimer; no relation) was originally German, but for some reason left Germany in 1933 to go make movies in France and then for some reason left France to go make movies in the United States before returning to France in 1950. So this is actually a Hollywood movie in English. (But it’s set in Europe (specifically Austria), and it feels European. It may be a Hollywood movie, but it definitely feels like it gets in on a technicality.)

As for calling it a tragedy, you may be thinking that this is a spoiler, but no: As the movie opens, a man is talking about a duel he has scheduled for the following morning, where he expects to die. He promises a couple of men that he’ll be there bright and early… right before telling his servant that it’s time to pack up, as they’re leaving in the night.

But before he can go, he gets — yes — a letter from an unknown woman, which starts off with the woman telling him that she may already be dead by the time he reads this. So we’re now five minutes into the movie, and there are already two (2) deaths hanging over our head.

And so this is just a framing story; the remainder of the movie is taking place in the past — telling us about how this woman knows this guy, and how he means so much to her despite her being an unknown woman to him.

I won’t spoil it from here, but — like Earrings or Charulata — it’s a movie where the events are pure melodrama, but the acting and characters are so naturalistic and dead-on that it feels grounded and realistic. The movie follows these characters across decades of their lives, and at every point they feel right[1] — yes, this is how she would act as a young woman; and yes, that’s how she’d act as a more worldly older woman. Even when she’s behaving in silly ways, we can see that it’s because the woman is still, in important ways, that girl on the inside.

There’s a lot to like here, and the ending is one that will stick with me. I can easily see how this would make someone’s personal top ten list, and I think it might be my favorite of the two Ophuls movies that I’ve seen.

  1. The one thing that’s not quite right is her physical appearance at all ages. When we first see her, she’s supposed to be a teenager, but she looks like she’s at least in her mid-twenties, probably because the actress is actually in her thirties. She acts convincingly like a teenager, but it takes some willful suspension of disbelief to see her as one. But short of casting another actress for this part (which would have worked less well) or using digital de-aging (a technology which was not yet as advanced in 1948 as it is today), there’s not much to be done about this. ↩︎