A Film Canon

This ingenious adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's iconic play distils its central motif - the carousel of love - into a tipsy combination of vertical, horizontal and circular movement, thereby explicating it as a cipher for the sexual frenzy that forms the common denominator between its ten vignettes of fleeting, clandestine and taboo love. To this end, Ophüls pairs his signature tracking-shots with increasingly tilted cameras (especially in and around bedrooms), diagonally-inflected compositions, and a mise-en-scene that typically consists of lovers in the middle distance, and the Viennese streetscape in the foreground, as if to evoke the web of relations in which they are inextricably caught, as does the hyperbolic linearity and circularity of the narrative. Not only does this mitigate against the palpable, deliberate staginess encapsulated in the narrator's (Anton Walbrook) personification of desire, but it compounds the risque sexual content (which touches on syphilis, premature ejaculation, orgasm and impotence) by grafting it onto Ophüls' Romantic moment; or, rather, replaces both with a panorama of sexual anticipation and contemplation, into which a variety of profounder and more haunting concerns are collapsed. The result is an unusual combination of realism and theatricality, transgression and regression, that gestures towards some elusive sexual 'truth' even as it conceals it beneath layers of sparkling artifice, clarifying this very concealment as its constitutive factor, and providing one of the most erotic filmic experiences to date; a continual postponement of an impossible orgasm.