Madame de...

Max Ophüls's Madame de… (The Earrings of Madame de…) opened in 1953. It is Ophüls's finest film and one of the cornerstones of European post-war art cinema. In 2022 it entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll, and filmmakers as different as Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson have repeatedly named it as an influence. Adapted from Louise de Vilmorin's 1951 novella, it was Ophüls's penultimate feature; he died four years later.

A Parisian aristocrat known only as Madame de… (Danielle Darrieux), with private debts she would rather not disclose, secretly sells the diamond earrings her husband, General André de… (Charles Boyer), gave her as a wedding present. The earrings then pass through several hands (the jeweller, the General himself, his mistress, an Italian baron named Donati, played by Vittorio De Sica) and find their way back to Madame de, a circuit the film traces with formal precision.

Christian Matras shoots in long, fluid travelling shots, the camera moving with the characters through room after room of the de… apartments, most famously in the waltz sequence, and the look is among the most distinctive in 1950s European cinema. It is a period drama, and also a study of love tokens: what they are worth socially, what they actually mean, and how the conventions of the European aristocracy hem in everyone who lives by them. Boyer, Darrieux and De Sica form one of the most finely balanced triangles in the medium.