(1950; French, b/w) "I am you," begins our guide (Anton Walbrook): "I am the personification of your desire," as he takes us on the carousel of coquetry, nine episodes of amour, each linked to the other in a chain of "sudden and fleeting" love. Director Max Ophuls's classic comedy was adapted from a work by Arthur Schnitzler.

Preferring the past ("more certain than the future") - Vienna in the spring of 1900 - Nobody (aka Anybody) sets the merry-go-round in motion with a prostitute, Léocadie (Simone Signoret), beckoning to a soldier, Franz (Serge Reggiani) - no charge to military officers, only civilians, she says. Barely getting back to his barracks in time (the raconteur blowing the bugle for retreat), Franz goes to the park Saturday night with Marie (Simone Simon), a chambermaid, whom he leaves waiting for him as he goes off to dance with a blonde; she takes a stroll with our omniscient narrator of interludes, who informs her that her evening with her soldier will cost her her job, but assures her that in two weeks all will be well.

Marie's new employer's son Alfred (Daniel Gélan), a student awaiting the arrival of his tutor, seduces the willing housemaid. Soon after Alfred, having rented an apartment, anxiously awaits a romantic rendezvous with Mademoiselle Breitkopf (Danielle Darrieux), a prim and proper woman unhappy in her marriage, who tells the coachman she will only be five minutes; two hours later ("just being good friends" in bed with Alfred, who relates the story of cavalry officers in Stendhal's book, On Love, one of whom boasts of spending three days in bed weeping for joy with the woman of his desires) she emerges, giving a different coachman (our cicerone) directions home.

In their bedroom, lying in separate beds, Charles Breitkopf (Fernand Gravey) tells his young wife: "Husbands can't always be lovers." There must be periods of calm following periods of, well, not so calm: "Alternation is the principle of life." When she asks him if he ever in his youth, for he's much older and more experienced than she, had an affair with a married woman, he stridently denies it, demanding to know if she knows or suspects anyone among her married acquaintances behaving disreputably. Such fallen women are drawn to respectable females out of "a nostalgia for virtue." True love, he instructs Emma, has the qualities of truth and purity.

To a private dining room at a posh restaurant, Charles brings Anna (Odette Joyeux), a grisette, to whom he makes love ("naughty champagne"), telling her (she reminds him of another from his youth) he's from out of town but would like to set her up in a little love nest for his occasional visits. Anna, however, pursues a poet, Robert Kuhlenkampf (Jean-Louis Barrault): "My thoughts illuminate the page" in the dark of her apartment. Using language unlike anyone else she knows, Robert speaks of there being "no true love without farewells."

Clocks, watches, or characters asking, "What time is it?" (notice how often it's 11pm, though actually five till midnight) contribute to the sense of time's turning, diminishing, each lover checking to see how much of life is left.

Robert writes plays, and the object of his desire, the actress Charlotte (Isa Miranda), acts in them; she, however, performs for the Count (Gérard Philipe), for whom "happiness doesn't exist," only the moment for pleasure. Our censor, editing the film of the bedroom scene, brings us full circle after the Count, getting drunk, forgets his tryst with Charlotte and finds Léocadie in his bed the next morning.

It's all silly, harmless nostalgia from another time and place; though the future remains uncertain, love continues to make the world go 'round.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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