"The Earrings of Madame de..." is a love story made for the movies. It's made for the movies because it shows visually the way love can make us feel, it can show a new love blooming between two people during a waltz which to them last for weeks. It can show the transformation of a ripped up love letter which seamlessly turns into falling snow from a train. It can show the transformation of a woman who once only thought of materialistic things into someone who would trade it all for the passion in her life.
"The Earrings of Madame de...." is a magical, romantic film, not just in the love story but in its ideas, it flows fluidly like the camera movements we are not meant to notice but makes it all move like a dream.
The story centers on a woman only known to us as Madame de... (Danielle Darrieux) She is a rich aristocratic woman who is married into a loveless marriage to a French military man (Charles Boyer). At the beginning of the film we see her searching for some earrings, for which she wants to sell back to the jeweler in order to pay off some debts. The earrings were a gift from her husband so they mean nothing to her.
Later that night, she pretends she has lost the earrings, but later her husband finds out from the jeweler she sold them. He buys back the earrings only to give them to an old lover of his who's leaving town. She has to give up the earrings for money and they then land into the hands of an Italian Baron named Donati (Vittorio De Sica). Donati sees Madame De... one day and falls for her hard. The two start an affair together and he later gives her the very same earrings she thought were gone from her life forever. The earrings are the same, but now they are given to her by a man who she loves, but soon because of her little white lie to her husband at the beginning of the film, her fate is sealed.
"The Earrings of Madame de..." was directed by Max Ophuls, filmmaker I don't know much about, I've only seen a handful of his films, but each one has impressed me with its elegance and style. Ophuls was a German director, but he made films all over Europe as well as in Hollywood. "Madame de..." is a french film which was co-financed by the french and the italians. Ophuls was known as someone who mastered the moving camera, sometimes he uses it to show a person's point of view such as the beginning where we follow Madame de in her bedroom searching for her earrings. The most impressive moment for the moving camera probably comes in the ballroom scene where we see the evolution of the love blooming between Madame de and Donati. The ballroom is where they rendezvous, and the seen cuts to days and days after as their love grows. It's sort of like the antithesis of the breakfast scene in "Citizen Kane", where we saw two people in love at the beginning than are shown that deteriorating as it progresses. The use of the waltz is quite effective, not once does it look like they are doing their own dancing, I suspect they were on a lift which moved around as the camera followed, it gives the effect of two people floating through the room, past other onlookers, we are as swept up as they are.
The music is another character in the film. The main love theme which was by Oscar Strauss and Georges Van Parys is one of the most beautiful constant love themes ever played, we sense the romance and passion in the music, much like the film it's part of this dream.
The real core of "The Earrings of Madame de..." might be frivolous to some. We are dealing with upper class people, from an earlier period, films like these aren't often made today. If they are they usually appear stuffy and self-important. This film frees itself for convention period drama, in part it's about a woman who lived a life of materialism and she could've gone on quite happily that way, but she chose to fall in love with a man who was not her husband and their were consequences for that. However because of her new found love, she is able to find a deeper meaning, and a new found passion for love she didn't have. She could've been quite an unsympathetic woman had she not found this love. Yet we do feel for her husband, a man who sits coldly by at the beginning who has to endure her beautiful wife being flaunted over by admirers, only now to be pushed aside for a man she is really in love with. The husband isn't without his passion which brings this film to a tragic conclusion, yet it remains beautiful because love seems to bring all these people into an understanding, they become human beings for us, and how could we blame these people for being in love.
I'm curious to know if love does in fact exist in the way we're able to portray it in the movies. Can it be that passionate, where you're willing to give up all you treasure for the one you love. Can you become sick with love? Can it make you go crazy? Yes this is all melodrama, perhaps a film like this couldn't be made today, it may be too melodramatic for people to take seriously, still it's beautiful, it's elegant, it's like a sweet dream, it's one of the great romantic pictures. When I first saw this film I thought it was cold and frivolous, time as gone by, I now see how lovely it is, it speaks to the romantic in me and to the one who believes love exists and it can be a very beautiful thing, at least in the movies.
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