Lola Montès

Max Ophüls’ final film, Lola Montès, was something of an ‘orphan’ in its day. Made in 1955, it circulated for years after in battered and cut prints, According to historians, the most expensive French movie made up to that point did not perform well at the box office, and was not popular with critics either. The producers chopped it up, while an ailing Ophüls looked on.

To be sure, Lola Montès is a deeply strange (and absolutely breathtaking) film and watching it today, you can’t help but think that filmmakers as diverse as Derek Jarman, Baz Luhrmann, Peter Greenaway, and Sally Potter must have seen it. Baroque, theatrical, surreal and totally cinematic, Ophüls’ vision is an astonishing blend of the conventional epic costume pic and experimental cinema. There’s not a breath of realism in it, yet, in its exaggerated style, there’s no alienation but a powerful emotional grip.

Structured as a series of flashbacks, the film’s plot deals with the title character, a lady with a "notorious” reputation. The real Lola lived in 19th century Europe and was lover to Franz Litszt and the King of Bavaria and apparently quite a few others. But in Ophüls’ ironic treatment this bio-pic of a famed (or infamous) femme fatale is a meditation on self-made celebrity.

As the movie opens Lola (Martine Carol) is holding centre stage...in a circus! While the Ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) issues forth with a stream of hype, Lola sits impassive, remote, with a rock-like beauty that can’t ever live up to the legend. The film cuts away from this framing device to canvas Lola’s romantic exploits; like her involvement with Ludwig (Anton Walbrook) and a student (Oskar Werner). So bizarre and compelling is Ophüls’ style that when it’s revealed half way through that the circus is ‘real’, a part of the fiction of the story (as opposed to fantasy), it’s a bracing shock. Great stuff.