The revival of Lola Montès, screening at Film Forum through Oct. 30, announces itself dramatically: a title card describes the process by which cut scenes were re-inserted and director Max Ophüls’ original sound mix, colors, and format were restored. Then come the credits—gloriously huge cursive titles with bombastic orchestral music playing in the background. I haven’t seen such ludicrous, marvelous excess in some time—at least, not since reading this month’s Vanity Fair on the subway down to Houston Street.
In its narrative and artistic elements, Lola Montès is not unlike a glossy magazine. Both certainly represent escapism at its finest. Lola is the protagonist of a soap-operatic story line of a lower-class courtesan who carries on a series of affairs and somehow ends up bedding the king, a story juicy enough to make the pages of any Condé Nast publication. Ophüls’ shots—so saturated with color and so unusual in their angles and movement—are like the best photos Annie Leibovitz never took.
But while Vanity Fair is enjoyably frothy—if one doesn’t want to read about the tragic or the political, there’s always the article about the lower-class British girl who somehow ends up bedding Prince William—Lola Montès is a bit more complicated. The film begins with a color-drenched circus scene that’s fun to look at, but also represents the final degradation of Lola, sitting in stony silence and lit entirely in scarlet. The ringleader promises to ask Lola all manner of “indiscreet” questions, and the viewer is drawn in as well, asking questions of his or her own: how did this beautiful woman with the penitent, horrified expression end up as a sideshow? How will Ophüls up the visual ante?
Answering the second question first, Ophüls manages. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a film that paid more attention to cramming visual splendor into every shot. Ophüls even fades very slowly between the present-day and flashback scenes, so that the vistas of actress Martine Carol’s face are still visible as the glamour of her old life unreels. It’s as though she’s wondering just how she ended up a sideshow when she used to ride in carriages in fur-lined capes. The glamour of Lola’s old life, as seen in extensive flashbacks, is deliriously escapist for the viewer, but it’s also a figment of Lola’s imagination. She’s reliving her past to escape her present. Lola Montès is as much a statement about the cinema’s ability to provide escapism as it is a fun romp.
It’s tricky writing about Lola Montès because it turned out to both fulfill every expectation I had, and confound my expectations as well. The trailer I saw a month ago featured not a single line of dialogue—just Lola in a succession of outfits, with different men and in different palatial settings. She was like a paper doll. I had thought that going from looking at the photos of Amy Adams done up like Rita Hayworth in Vanity Fair to seeing Lola Montès dancing her way through Europe on-screen would be a lateral move, and it sort of was. The flashback scenes of Lola’s time as a young socialite, bedding Franz Liszt and staying overnight in German castles, are so instantly gripping that one doesn’t delve much beneath the surface. It’s easy to miss the look of desolation that flickers across Carol’s face when Liszt decides to leave her, the way she exhales cigarette smoke languorously but inhales sharply, as though her life depends upon it.
“In the entire world, scandal means money, and in America, it has no limit,” the ringleader tells the now-famous Lola when first attempting to convince her to tour with him. This line got laughs at the screening I attended, the kind of laughs that indicate the viewer’s agreement, and contempt for the scandal-hungry American public. But those same viewers bought tickets for a film about a woman who sleeps her way through Europe only to end up in a golden cage, having her hands kissed for money. Whose appetite for scandal is being quenched?
Not Lola’s, I don’t think. She is truly happy in her romance with the king, and when driven out by the hands of a revolutionary mob—this movie has everything—she turns down the opportunity to have another adventure. “I’ve lived too much, had too many adventures,” she tells a young philosophy student who wants to run away with her. Lola Montès may be an escapist masterpiece, but Lola herself can’t escape her fate. On the train ride back to campus, I started flipping through Vanity Fair again, but it all seemed a little too glossy, too saturated. I settled on the article about Colombian hostages, but stared at the same page until long after I’d left downtown.
Dan D’Addario is a Columbia College junior majoring in American studies. Brief Encounters runs alternating Wednesdays.
