From One Bed to Another

The wheel turns and lovers change in their significance and identity, each caught in the ever changing stream of reflections in 1950's La Ronde. Max Ophuls' adaptation of the 1897 play was considered obscene in America, of course, as it not only acknowledged the existence of sex but of extramarital sex. But it's a lovely, delicate, oddly sweet film about how people are isolated in a crowd by discreet lies and the roles they play.

Anton Walbrook plays our interdimensional host, striking a graceful, slightly melancholy, ruminating tone as he tells us how people are doomed to only seeing one half of their relationships. He alone, a strange figure who stands outside the logic of the film, sees La ronde, sees the unending cycle. Identifying the film set and the artificiality of the production, he transports us to 1900. "I adore the past," he says. "It's so much more peaceful than the present."

He meets with the first of the film's magnificent ensemble cast, Simone Signoret, playing a prostitute. Frustrated at being unable to find a john, she finally offers free sex to a soldier. He hastily accepts. Clearly she expected some consideration in the end, but she ends up loudly rebuking him for not even giving her a cigarette as he rushes off to his girlfriend, a chambermaid played by Simone Simon, whom he will also abandon.

Walbrook consoles her that she will find a better situation, romantically and professionally, as a chambermaid to a wealthy family. She makes love to their handsome son, perhaps his first love, and then we follow him to the arms of a wealthy, married woman (Danielle Darrieux). We follow her seemingly sexless husband to a scene where he seduces a 19 year old shopgirl (Odette Joyeux).

This after a lecture to his wife about the moral decrepitude of adulterous women. With his wife and with the shopgirl, he arranges things to be perceived as a moral and/or sexual authority, but to us, and, to some extent, to them, he only looks small and foolish. But everyone in this chain tells lies, clings to a perception of sexual dynamics, however obviously false. To borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, do any of them on line know what any of it is worth?

La Ronde is available on The Criterion Channel and HBOMax.