It feels like cheating to write about a women's picture for the sake of a man, but I have never seen Peter Ustinov play anyone like the ringmaster in Max Ophüls' Lola Montès (1955). He's sexual, cruel, cynical, vulnerable: I had just been saying to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch that no one ever seemed to notice how good-looking the actor was when younger, but Ophüls noticed and used it to unsettle. With his lion-taming whip-cracks and his pandering spiel, the character could have been merely grotesque, a caricature of male authority selling the spectacle of the femme fatale with a practiced blend of salaciousness and sentiment. It's harder to pin down what he is. He can't be written off as a parasite when he has his own disturbing charisma, theatrical as his affectation of a monocle and as little to be trusted as his cheap-seats panorama of the life of Lola Montez, but we can still feel its impact on the audience of the Mammoth Circus, which is extra-diegetically us. He orchestrates the action as ruthlessly as any director's avatar and he's entangled in it; his practical, collegial asides to his star attraction in between flamboyantly putting her through her paces are some of our first clues to the gap between the fantasy of the heartless, glittering adventuress and the reality of the ailing, heartsick woman. I am fascinated by the chronologically first scene he shares with Martine Carol's Lola, the arrival of his carriage in the Tati-like round of visitors to her hotel on the Riviera announced by a brassily discordant, seedily enticing vamp. Dutch-angled in his tall hat and his leopard-collared coat and his jade-headed cane, the ringmaster introduces himself by business, not by name, a "man of the circus" credentialed first and foremost by his expert exploitation of the celebrity maxim that "scandal means money." Whether he refrains because she wouldn't like it or withholds because she would, he does not offer his skeptically cigar-lighting hostess any soft soap of compliments or even the promise of fame; he delivers his proposition in coolly material terms, seats himself at her writing desk and begins drawing up a contract as if he's her manager already, dispassionately evaluating her beauty and criticizing her smoking, checking the restless movements that characterize her as much as her increasingly frustrated pursuit of a life on her own terms, which for a woman means scandals always in her wake. "Talent doesn't interest me . . . Only power and efficiency." He states it so neutrally, it doesn't even read as an insult. It has the ring of truth with which he is otherwise avowedly unconcerned. So does the casual sting of his parable of the elephant which now loves the music it was trained to play. And then as he's taking his hat to go, leaving the contract which we know from the first carnivalesque moments of the film she has not so much rejected as deferred, he addresses her for the first time by name, advancing the intimacy of a "fellow professional." A little shrug of the shoulders, suddenly so recognizable from so many more diffident characters played by Ustinov. He catches her to him and kisses her. It looks like his one uncalculated gesture, an impulse rather than a gamble. The Cinemascope narrows itself—an in-camera trick of black velvet masking—as at other signal moments of Lola's life. Vulnerability on Ustinov is usually comic, a joke at his own expense as often as not, but the half-glimpsed expression on the ringmaster's face is piercing as she touches his beautiful mouth and tells him not even unkindly, "Don't be foolish, not like the others." In a film of endless ironies and ambiguities, it's one of the most ambiguous lines. Is she mocking him, her would-be pimp turned suitor on a dime? Sincerely cautionary, disappointed in a routine move? Does she want just one man who doesn't fall under her spell, even if it puts their relationship on a rapaciously commercial footing, the bluntest and perhaps least disguised of the heterosexual transactions that have governed her life since her mother tried to sell her at sixteen to a rich old man and she escaped by bartering herself to a worthless young one instead? One can hardly accuse the ringmaster of dealing in honesty, except perhaps in this: he said from the start that he would use her. And what does he get out of it, beyond a cut of the cash forked over by the male rubes who queue after the show for an "unforgettable souvenir" of the notorious Lola Montez as she sits caged among the beasts of the menagerie with her dollar-a-kiss hands extruded through the bars like a peep-show anchorite? Having coaxed her personally into the death-defying leap that she took as though she meant to die of it, he murmurs as she resigns herself to her public, "I was terrified, you know. I couldn't live without you." We believe him. What the hell he thinks he means by it, only Max Ophüls, the ultimate master of this ceremony, knows. It's a sumptuous, self-deconstructing, ecstatically artificial film and it wouldn't work without the still center of Carol, but Ustinov's so good in it. This power brought to you by my efficient backers at Patreon.
spatch that no one ever seemed to notice how good-looking the actor was when younger, but Ophüls noticed and used it to unsettle. With his lion-taming whip-cracks and his pandering spiel, the character could have been merely grotesque, a caricature of male authority selling the spectacle of the femme fatale with a practiced blend of salaciousness and sentiment. It's harder to pin down what he is. He can't be written off as a parasite when he has his own disturbing charisma, theatrical as his affectation of a monocle and as little to be trusted as his cheap-seats panorama of the life of Lola Montez, but we can still feel its impact on the audience of the Mammoth Circus, which is extra-diegetically us. He orchestrates the action as ruthlessly as any director's avatar and he's entangled in it; his practical, collegial asides to his star attraction in between flamboyantly putting her through her paces are some of our first clues to the gap between the fantasy of the heartless, glittering adventuress and the reality of the ailing, heartsick woman. I am fascinated by the chronologically first scene he shares with Martine Carol's Lola, the arrival of his carriage in the Tati-like round of visitors to her hotel on the Riviera announced by a brassily discordant, seedily enticing vamp. Dutch-angled in his tall hat and his leopard-collared coat and his jade-headed cane, the ringmaster introduces himself by business, not by name, a "man of the circus" credentialed first and foremost by his expert exploitation of the celebrity maxim that "scandal means money." Whether he refrains because she wouldn't like it or withholds because she would, he does not offer his skeptically cigar-lighting hostess any soft soap of compliments or even the promise of fame; he delivers his proposition in coolly material terms, seats himself at her writing desk and begins drawing up a contract as if he's her manager already, dispassionately evaluating her beauty and criticizing her smoking, checking the restless movements that characterize her as much as her increasingly frustrated pursuit of a life on her own terms, which for a woman means scandals always in her wake. "Talent doesn't interest me . . . Only power and efficiency." He states it so neutrally, it doesn't even read as an insult. It has the ring of truth with which he is otherwise avowedly unconcerned. So does the casual sting of his parable of the elephant which now loves the music it was trained to play. And then as he's taking his hat to go, leaving the contract which we know from the first carnivalesque moments of the film she has not so much rejected as deferred, he addresses her for the first time by name, advancing the intimacy of a "fellow professional." A little shrug of the shoulders, suddenly so recognizable from so many more diffident characters played by Ustinov. He catches her to him and kisses her. It looks like his one uncalculated gesture, an impulse rather than a gamble. The Cinemascope narrows itself—an in-camera trick of black velvet masking—as at other signal moments of Lola's life. Vulnerability on Ustinov is usually comic, a joke at his own expense as often as not, but the half-glimpsed expression on the ringmaster's face is piercing as she touches his beautiful mouth and tells him not even unkindly, "Don't be foolish, not like the others." In a film of endless ironies and ambiguities, it's one of the most ambiguous lines. Is she mocking him, her would-be pimp turned suitor on a dime? Sincerely cautionary, disappointed in a routine move? Does she want just one man who doesn't fall under her spell, even if it puts their relationship on a rapaciously commercial footing, the bluntest and perhaps least disguised of the heterosexual transactions that have governed her life since her mother tried to sell her at sixteen to a rich old man and she escaped by bartering herself to a worthless young one instead? One can hardly accuse the ringmaster of dealing in honesty, except perhaps in this: he said from the start that he would use her. And what does he get out of it, beyond a cut of the cash forked over by the male rubes who queue after the show for an "unforgettable souvenir" of the notorious Lola Montez as she sits caged among the beasts of the menagerie with her dollar-a-kiss hands extruded through the bars like a peep-show anchorite? Having coaxed her personally into the death-defying leap that she took as though she meant to die of it, he murmurs as she resigns herself to her public, "I was terrified, you know. I couldn't live without you." We believe him. What the hell he thinks he means by it, only Max Ophüls, the ultimate master of this ceremony, knows. It's a sumptuous, self-deconstructing, ecstatically artificial film and it wouldn't work without the still center of Carol, but Ustinov's so good in it. This power brought to you by my efficient backers at Patreon.
