cinehunch
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Ophüls again turns romantic society into a glittering trap: elaborate camera movement, circular storytelling, and a woman’s public image masking an increasingly painful inner life.
02
Why this pick
Its fractured recollections reconstruct a glamorous woman’s life after the fact, balancing Hollywood-scale artifice with a melancholy awareness of how celebrity turns a person into a spectacle.
03
Why this pick
A richly colored theatrical world lets a celebrated performer move between stage illusion and courtly desire, with playful surfaces gradually revealing the costs of being watched and possessed.
04
Why this pick
For the saturated period pageantry and backstage theatricality: Renoir makes performance, commerce, romance, and the construction of a female star inseparable.
05
Why this pick
Less spectacular but equally precise in its tragic romantic design, it uses memory and a woman’s retrospective voice to make longing feel both exquisitely intimate and socially constrained.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
In the mid-19th-century, Lola Montès (Martine Carol) is a famous, past-her-prime dancer and courtesan who has led an eventful and highly scandalous life. (She supposedly holds a world record for number of lovers.) She is now reduced to performing in a New Orleans circus, where an impresario/ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) has both befriended and exploited her by making her the central attraction. In the course of a single circus performance — which dramatically reenacts Lola's life and career — flashbacks reveal, first, her affair with composer Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg); second, her unhappy youth and marriage to her own mother's boyfriend, Lt. Thomas James (Ivan Desny); and then her scandalous public breakup with conductor Claudio Pirotto (Claude Pinoteau). Along the way, her career as a dancer and "actress" has its ups and downs and she initially rejects the career advances of a younger version of Ustinov's impresario. In a longer flashback, constituting most of the second half of the film, her career as courtesan reaches a peak: her affair with the Bavarian Ludwig I of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook), which incenses his subjects and leads to his eventual downfall in the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states. In a final circus sequence, Lola — a "fallen woman" — ascends to the apex of the big top tent for a symbolic, death-defying plunge. She is last seen allowing herself to be touched, or kissed, by a very long queue of male, fee-paying circus patrons.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Franz Liszt
Stewardess
Doctor
Leutnant James
Student
Circus Master
Horsema Maurice
Anna
