Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Earrings of Madame de...
1953 · Max Ophüls · The Earrings of Madame de... on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera glide instead of cutting between rooms. (camera)
Ophüls keeps the camera in nearly constant motion, following characters through doorways and around corners while the wider social world stays visible at the edges.
Payoff: You're always aware of who else is watching, even during the most private-seeming moments.
Notice how often mirrors and doorways frame Louise. (staging)
Ophüls repeatedly places her inside arches, picture frames, and mirrors within mirrors, arrangements that suggest display as much as shelter.
Payoff: There is no room in this film that functions as only a private room. In the reading: the saturated crystal. The reading calls this a saturated crystal: a mirror-lined world with no outside, where private and performed can't be told apart.
Watch each ballroom dance grow shorter than the last. (cutting)
Four waltz sequences compress weeks of the affair into minutes of screen time, and each one is edited down to less than the one before it.
Payoff: She barely chooses anything. The room's own motion does the carrying. In the reading: the movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the dancer goes still and lets the room's own motion do the carrying.
Listen for the same waltz returning changed each time. (sound)
The melody associated with the countess and Donati is heard first in full, lush orchestration, then returns modified, abbreviated, or turned ironic as the story continues.
Payoff: One tune tracks the whole relationship's arc without a single line of dialogue explaining it.
Watch Louise's playful surface for the first real crack. (performance)
Darrieux plays her as pure lightness at first, and lets real feeling intrude on her manner so gradually you notice it before she does.
Payoff: You catch her falling in love before the character herself admits it.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what Louise does with her hands whenever the earrings come up again.