La Ronde

This is pretty brilliant… I wonder now if I should have been more attuned to the sort of thing from Ophüls in the past, but this seems to be as saturated with visual romance as usual, and superficially with a narrative to match: a series of couples meet for brief encounters, passing the torch from one to the next. Yet actually there’s a rather nasty flipside to it: not only are these a series of casual infidelities, but actually it tracks the course of venereal disease among nearly a dozen lovers in turn-of-the-century Vienna, beginning with Simone Signoret’s prostitute. Anton Walbrook wanders through “love’s merry-go-round” and orchestrates this waltz in a variety of disguises, a wry and practical Cupid never shocked by nor critical of love’s true course. Amidst the usual dreamy music and sumptuous photography, this is really a savagely funny and terribly frank farce.