Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34086 in VHS
• Released on: 1994-12-01
• Formats: Black & White, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 94 minutes

Amazon.com
Max Ophüls is remembered for bringing grace to the tragic melodrama, but among his finest works are a pair of bittersweet collections of romantic tales, viewed through the ironic lens of Ophüls's gliding camera. Le Plaisir is the second of these two, following his masterful roundelay La Ronde, a portrait of romance as a foolish game between deceiving lovers. Le Plaisir, based on the stories of Guy du Maupassant, takes a gentler, more wistful approach to the subject of love and desire through its three tales. Le Masque is the melancholy story of an old man as a veritable dancing wax museum figure hopelessly grasping for his lost youth in a nightly masquerade. La Maison Tellier, "a fairy tale for adults," in the words of the narrator (Jean Servais playing Maupassant), is a delightful tale of a local brothel that closes for a night for a visit to the country, where the ladies have gone to celebrate a young girl's first communion. Jean Gabin is delightful as the charming country bumpkin who plays host to the troupe and becomes sweetly smitten with flirty Danielle Darrieux. The finale, Le Modele, stars Daniel Gélin and Simone Simon as young lovers whose imminent breakup heads toward tragedy, but takes a fateful turn both sad and sweet. The bittersweet satire is lovingly leavened by Ophüls's generosity of character, but a wistful sense of regret hovers over each tale, a weary sadness enriched by wry delicacy and beautiful flowing camera work. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Here's the vision quest of our civilization.
This is not only one of the most profound films ever made, but one of the most dazzling and charming depictions of spirituality, etc., ever created. At the beginning, a person moves from darkness and cold and rain toward a place of light and warmth and dryness, seeking pleasure and happiness there, and that is the pattern throughout these tales. What is sought and found in the light escaletes ... toward what? Le Plaisir presents us with a playful Modern ironic version (or re-version) of the Romantic Idealist version of the Christian version of the Ladder of Love descrived in Plato's Symposium. Upward, from love of appetitive gratification to the emotional, to the intellectual, and finally to the spiritual: as Miss Rosa who gives of herself in the most direct manner and who selflessly weeps for the joy of others is given in return that moment of grace through which those nearby also share in the transfiguration, in the light of which the world is changed.

A real pleasure
While not a masterpiece on the same order as Ophul's MADAME DE or LOLA MONTES, LE PLAISIR features enough of Ophuls's signatory trademarks to make it a viewing pleasure. Opulent sets and endless tracking shots transport the viewer to a world where romance is paramount and bittersweet resolution is almost always a certainty.

This is an episodic film based on the work of Guy de Maupassant. There are a couple of fairly brief tales, "The Mask" and "The Model" and a third story, "Madame Tellier's House", which runs nearly feature length and has a charming premise of a bordello being closed so the employees can celebrate the madame's niece's communion. It turns out the prostitutes are more than fleshly commodities. They have a spiritual side as well.

If the film has a detraction, it is probably Peter Ustinov's unfortunate and superfluous English voiceover. Faking a French accent, Ustinov manages to be more annoying than insightful.

But then again Ophuls's films aren't about the sounds. They're about the sights, and what sumptious visuals we have here!

Max Ophuls' marvelous film of pleasure and, perhaps, love
The screen is pitch black and we hear a voice..."I'm so happy to be talking in the dark as if I were beside you, and maybe I am." The speaker is Guy de Maupassant (voiced by Jean Marais), and Le Plaisir is three of his stories filmed by the great director Max Ophuls. The connecting thread? That pleasure, or even love, lies in how people intermingle their lives, with a shrug, assumptions, an apology, a thank you. Le Plaisir is not so much a sophisticated film of attraction and hope as it is a film of rueful wisdom. It's best to keep in mind while watching this movie that while life can be enjoyed, there are times when hope can disappear.

The three stories consist of, first, La Masque. We are in 19th Century Paris at the Palais de la Dance, where great, swirling balls are held. This is a place where young women hope to find pleasure and rich men; where old women chase memories and young suitors; where prostitutes and their pimps gather, where the men are young bucks and old goats, where "rough cotton to the finest cambric" can combine. One slender man in full dinner dress rushes into the palace and begins to dance with a beautiful young woman. He prances and kicks, yet his face is like a frozen mask of youth. He collapses on the dance floor and a doctor is called. When the doctor loosens the man's clothes, he finds...well, let's say that when the man is delivered home to his wife by the doctor, she tells him a story of the battle between pleasure and love.

In La Maison Tellier, we learn all about a cozy, friendly and long established brothel in a small town on the Channel coast. The bourgeois men of the town are as well-known there as they are to their wives. Then Madame decides to close her establishment for a night so that she and her girls can travel into the countryside to attend her niece's first communion. They have one or two adventures on the train. In the small village they spend the night with Madame's brother and meet the young girl. They attend the communion in the village church. They collect flowers on the way back, and are met with genuine affection and with great gaiety when Madame reopens her place of business the following night. We witness a touching story, as de Maupassant tells us, when pleasure and purity come together.

Le Modele gives us a story where pleasure struggles with moral decay, where "happiness is not a joyful thing." We witness a painter and his model meet, rapturously embrace lust and, as lust tires, recrimination grows. The love which endures as the story plays out may not be most people's idea of happiness.

This is a marvelously told series of stories. La Masque and Le Modele are relatively short bookends to the major tale of La Maison Tellier. With this one, it would be difficult not to become delighted and engaged with Madame and her girls and her brother. Even the puffed up townsmen are not without a sympathetic side; which man among us wouldn't mind being flattered, even for a price, by Madame's girls?

In the cast are some of France's best known actors, including Claude Dauphin, Danielle Darrieux, Jean Gabin, Daniel Gelin, Simon Simon, Madeleine Renaud and Pierre Brasseur. The Region Two DVD has a fine black-and-white transfer as well as several excellent extras, the best being an hour-long documentary titled "A Journey Through Le Plaisir: On the Trail of Max Ophuls." A special note should be made of the English subtitles. They are among the best I've ever encountered. I don't read French, but they seem to capture what I imagine is the rueful, humane and amusing tone of the original. I would avoid the VHS version for the reasons noted by others. Invest in a region-free DVD player and discover the world of, especially, Region Two films. I purchased my disc from Amazon UK.