La Ronde
November 2008 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

With all the technically dazzling movies made today, why spend time with a black-and-white, monaural film from 1950 -- with subtitles yet? Why not leave the slow-paced, French-language La Ronde to students snoozing in film-history courses?

Why not? Because the film is still warm and breathing, still engaging, funny, challenging, and very beautiful. With his characteristic long sweeping shots, director Max Ophuls guides the large renowned cast of La Ronde through an ingenious interlocking sequence of romantic vignettes. The superb Anton Walbrook plays a sort of emcee, addressing the audience directly while operating a merry-go-round, the film’s dominating symbol for the engine of romantic passion. Sometimes he assumes alternate identities as he guides the chain of couples through their intrigues. Each actor appears in two "chapters," in one affair after another. "The Prostitute and the Soldier" is followed by "The Soldier and Marie." The soldier (Serge Reggiani) who rushed away from the prostitute (Simone Signoret) next rushes away from the respectable Marie (Simone Simon). The emcee appears from nowhere to lead the abandoned Marie by the arm into her future, a new job as a house maid, so the next chapter is "The Maid and the Young Man." The son in the new household (Daniel Gélin) has been peeping into the maids’ quarters. Once he has cut his teeth with Marie, we move on to "The Young Man and the Married Woman" (Danielle Darrieux). And so it progresses until the circle closes in the twelfth and last chapter between "The Count [Gérard Philipe] and the Prostitute." She is the very one (Simone Signoret) who chased after the soldier in chapter one.

"Cinema’s most tactful anatomist of love," Anthony Lane called Ophuls in a 2002 New Yorker tribute at the centenary of his birth. "The atmosphere in his movies is so congenial, and the brilliance so lightly worn, that we may not notice how acutely he is laying bare our illusions." It’s all irony, wit, elegance, and charm, one of the lightest of Ophuls’ major films, yet full of his signature motifs, themes, and techniques.

The great care Criterion took with this reissue is yet another tribute to Ophuls. The spotless high-definition digital transfer was made from an original 35mm duplicate negative and a new 35mm duplicate negative made from an original nitrate 35mm fine-grain master positive. The image has beautiful, rich depth and texture. The soundtrack has had similar care and has been freed of all hiss and crackle. In this special edition, Criterion has assembled a rich depth of features too, from audio commentary to interviews with actor Daniel Gélin, film scholar Alan Williams, and, most interesting, Ophuls’ son, the documentarist Marcel Ophuls, who made The Sorrow and the Pity. A fine essay by Terrence Rafferty is included in a handsome accompanying booklet.

It may have been La Ronde that Anthony Lane had in mind when he wrote in his tribute, "If you love movies, Ophuls is an undisputed heavyweight; but there are times, or strings of lustrous moments, when his movies feel lighter than pearls." So don’t permit the film-history students to hoard La Ronde, especially when such a fine reissue is at hand.

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