SOURCE: "Maupassant and Ophuls: The 'Real' and the 'Ideal' in 'La Maison Tellier' (Le Plaisir)," in Michigan Academician, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Summer, 1981, pp. 63-9.

[In the following essay, Meilgaard and Burdick examine Ophuls's cinematic adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's "Le Maison Teller" for his Le Plaisir.]

In his monograph on Guy de Maupassant, Henry James observes that "his vision of the world is for the most part a vision of ugliness . . . a certain absence of love, a sort of bird's-eye view of contempt."¹ This widely accepted view of Maupassant's work conceivably presented a challenge for the filmmaker Max Ophuls, whose main concerns were always nascent spirituality and growth as opposed to the primordial instincts of Maupassant's characters.

After having tempered the socially searing ironies of Arthur Schnitzler in Liebelei (1932) and La Ronde (1950), having introduced an element of male conscience and honor to the bitter dryness of Stefan Zweig in Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Ophuls directs his attention to the uncompromising naturalism of Maupassant. In three short stories by the French storyteller—"Le Masque," "Le Modèle," and "La Maison Tellier"—Ophuls finds material which he transforms into an anthology film bearing his own unmistakable stamp, Le Plaisir (1952). Made between La Ronde and Madame de (1953), Le Plaisir is probably the least known of the four French masterpieces upon which his reputation rests. (The fourth, Lola Montès, was made in 1955, two years before his death.)

"La Maison Tellier" (which, along with "Boule de Suif," is one of Maupassant's best-known short stories) takes up about two-thirds of the running time of Le Plaisir and can teach us much about both Maupassant and Ophuls.

In "La Maison" Maupassant calls upon his Norman heritage, his very real love of nature, and his knowledge of the significant role of the brothel in small Norman towns. As he says, "The prejudice against prostitution, which is so violent and deeply rooted in large towns, does not exist in the country places of Normandy."² Ophuls, in his turn, echoes this theme of innocence and normalcy as opposed to the city attitudes of prurience and vileness. The film version closely follows the original story in that there is an apparent similarity between the House of God and the House of Love; the curé and Madame, with their respective flocks, are symbolically contrasted.

The visit of Madame and her women to a country village where they are to attend the Confirmation of Madame's niece (Ophuls changes this to a First Communion) has much in common with the journey in "Boule de Suif: the theme of prostitution-patriotism in the latter is comparable to the antinomy of prostitution-respectability in the former. In both stories Maupassant studies all aspects of a society at close quarters. In "La Maison" he makes full use of his flair for comic irony: the division of the house into two distinct class establishments and the chameleon-like behavior which the women effect during the train journey to the village. And as a final coup, the tremendous prestige bestowed by the village community upon Madame's brother, Joseph Rivet, the village carpenter, who attends church with a bevy of "fine city ladies" is in Maupassantian manner both comically bizarre and deliberately cruel.

In Maupassant, the women of the brothel are uniformly worn and unattractive; their charms consist in the fact that they provide food for fantasy in a manner little different from the whores in Genet's Balcon. Maupassant's small-town men are caricatural or bestial, but they cannot live without their weekly ration of fantasy. Perhaps la maison fulfills, in the town, the function of the village church, with which it is structurally compared. Although Maupassant's whores are spiritually limited and physically unappealing, they occasion outpourings of feeling wherever they go. Men feel lust, women feel surgings of anguish and purification. The trip which transports the "ladies" from their town to the confirmation in the village brings about a crisis of frustration in the deserted town, and, later, a fascinating conjunction of corruption and purity in the country church, where the gaudily dressed women mingle in a seemingly harmonious congregation with white-robed pubescent communicants. Maupassant mercilessly throws every aspect of his Norman world into relief by such a system of oppositions.

In contrast, Ophuls transforms his whores into a veritable bouquet of flowers. Their first names (in the film) are prefaced by the dignified title of "Madame." "Mme. Rosa" is played by the ravishing Danielle Darrieux; "Mme. Raphaelle" is exotically handsome, "Mme. Fernande" pert and pretty;³ and "Mme. Louise" and "Mme. Flora," although not exactly beauties, are a great improvement over the two "pumps" in Maupassant's tale. In Ophuls, all of the main characters take on a dignity missing in the original. Mme. Rosa is capable of her own fantasies (of romance, respectability, and motherhood), while Jean Gabin, Mme. Tellier's peasant brother, is drawn to "Mme. Rosa" partly because she embodies sexual release, but mainly because he glimpses in her the glamor of another life (the town) and the glimmer of a sensibility lacking in his own limited world (the village with its narrow community, its lack of any "house" but the church).

Ophuls opens with an atmosphere reminiscent of his personal "Vienna," as he does in Liebelei and "Le Masque": mistiness, lampposts, and fluorescent trees. We are introduced to la maison by a long, typically vertiginous Ophulsian shot. In a voyeuristic journey, which almost totally excludes us from the interior, the camera roves upwards, encompassing the main floor café (Louise and Flora's humble domain, which services the sailors and the lower class) and then the second-story "Jupiter room," reserved for the town's "elite." It dwells briefly on a cherub-like head over the doorway, lingers on the sign, "Mme. Tellier," and then, in a slow lateral pan, permits no more than tantalizing, dismembered glimpses of the occupants shot through a series of slats, shutters, and blinds. Madame is seen tranquilly watering her plants and feeding her canaries; the "girls" are awaiting customers and lolling at their ease. According to Paul Willemen, Ophuls explains that this cinematic device—the looking inside from the outside—is precisely because the Maison Tellier is a maison close, a closed house:

So the camera is on the side of the Law, but it is the repressed (here the repression of the verbal term combined with the inscription of socio-sexual repression) which moves it along, obsessively circling its object of fascination, describing in its movement the outlines of the gaps in the social fabric, catching glimpses of the forbidden areas, but from the outside.⁴

The clientele in both Maupassant and Ophuls is representative of an elite small-town club, which, in distinction to the itinerant element of the downstairs café, is composed of the local bourgeoisie: tradesmen, petty government officials, the banker's son. Some are bachelors; most are not. For example, M. Tournevau, the fish-curer and a "dedicated" family man, goes there only on Saturdays. In Maupassant's words this is "Securitatis causa . . . a measure of sanitary policy which his friend (the doctor) had advised him to preserve."⁵

Once the house is discovered to be irrevocably "closed," a violent first fight breaks out between frustrated French and English sailors in both story and film. Ophuls has the no less disgruntled but more decorous habitués of the Jupiter room walk through the tomblike streets sighing, "mais, quand même, la nuit est belle" (but after all, it is a beautiful night), in tones of increasing resignation and despondency. The townsmen's dismay, occasioned by the brief vacation of the women, is similar in both story and film, as are the fights and quarrels which erupt between the petulant customers deprived of their evening chez Madame Tellier. In Ophuls there is a deliciously theatrical scene where the gloomy "regulars" sit in a semicircle with their backs to the audience, wearing an incongruous collection of "phallic" hats and observing the erotic symbol of a lighthouse whose lights flash on and off. Although the "elite" do not descend to lower-class fist fights, several acrimonious disputes now take place. This particular scene is typical of Ophuls' sense of theatricality: the disconsolate backs of the men and the seascape "erotica" convey to perfection a mood of vague "dislocation," which can be compared with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. (As with Estragon and Vladimir, the feeling of bored vacuity is easily transmogrified into irritability or argument.)

The first part of the Tellier journey is undertaken by train. Like his famous staircases, trains in Ophuls also take people in and out of each others' lives.⁶ Several viewings of the train in "La Maison," for example, will reveal Ophuls' meticulous attention to mise en scène. At one point the carriage contains nine people whose incredibly mobile expressions might go unnoticed in the general melee—so much is happening, and so quickly. When alone in the carriage and responding to the "holiday" mood, the women are characteristically noisy and uninhibited, albeit controlled by Madame, who like an authoritative schoolmarm reads aloud news items of political crises. With the entrance of the two old peasants carrying a basket of ducks, a certain simulation of respectability suddenly has to be maintained.

The old couple, astonished to find themselves in such questionable company, listen in amazement as Mme. Rosa recounts a fantasy of her "husband," who is not only aristocratic but generous and loving. This typically Ophulsian episode, which in other hands could be either mawkish or cruelly satirical, has a touching dignity enhanced by one of the few close-ups in the film. Rosa's face is full of yearning—the saintlike look which will convey so much poignancy in Madame de (where the title role will again be played by Danielle Darrieux).

This solemn, almost sacred mood is broken when the salesman, a gregarious, jovial rogue, irrupts into the carriage—clearly marked "Dames Seules"—along with a clattering collection of tacky luggage. Dashingly played by the great Pierre Brasseur, this knowing fellow is immediately aware of the women's profession, and his. coarse ribaldries serve to break the veneer of respectability.

Here, Ophuls' dialogue follows that of Maupassant practically word for word. As in other scenes, Ophuls manifests his mastery of juxtaposing the sacred and the profane—the dominating theme of the film. In the garter episode, for example, where the salesman persuades the "ladies" that they may keep his wares as long as he is allowed to put them on their legs, Maupassant makes a point of describing again the physical ugliness of the provincial prostitutes: he forces us to see their legs as dumpy or muscular. In contrast, Ophuls ends the scene with a bouquet of beautiful, begartered limbs, which would delight the most discerning of cancan connoisseurs. While adhering more or less consistently to Maupassant's realism and structure, Ophuls maintains his own integrity as an auteur.

Another far more important deviation from the original is the affinity (akin to love?) which Ophuls creates between Mme. Rosa and Joseph Rivet. The scene where Joseph is waiting to transport the guests to his establishment (maison), with a humble, improvised horse carriage, reveals courteous oafishness (on Joseph's part), girlish high spirits, and pastoral beauty in both Maupassant and Ophuls. But Ophuls literally floods the screen with views of the lush Norman landscape, whose fertility reflects the sexual vitality of the women driving through it. The rough-and-tumble in Maupassant (the women being thrown together in a raucous heap) is replaced by an idyllic journey accompanied by the enchanting waltz theme of Le Plaisir. The horse cart and its cargo of human "flowers" pauses for a moment at the village church where the young communicants are rehearsing; the sexuality of the prostitutes collides with the purity of the unseen girls. The waltz theme changes to a sacred hymn; and Rosa and Joseph, framed by the shadowed wooden slats of the cart, have the "look" of two (perhaps unlikely) people falling in love. The moment, the look, the framing, the barrier of the slats are pure Ophuls, transforming Maupassant's unprepossessing "Rosa the Jade" and Madame's loutish brother into almost idealized human beings—characters inviting viewer identification rather than satiric superiority. This moment connects and blurs the sacred and profane, inviting the viewer to contemplate the relations between "real" and "ideal."

In other sequences, Mme. Rosa, coquettish, but a little shy, informs Joseph that he is superior to town men and infinitely superior to the "distinguished" village mayor. In his turn, Joseph lifts her from the horse cart with the reverence normally accorded a queen and comforts her in church when, overwhelmed with emotion, remembering her own confirmation, she breaks into the tears which affect the whole congregation. In both Maupassant and Ophuls Joseph makes sexual advances to Rosa (which are repulsed in both versions), but Ophuls has Joseph sincerely apologizing for this unforgivable attack of drunken, animal lust—an admission which would be totally out of context in Maupassant's grimly realistic world. (Had Ophuls not retained the abortive seduction scene, the humanizing and tender aspects of the "love affair" might have become too sentimental.)

In both Maupassant and Ophuls, the church and the brothel serve a synonymous function: both become, as it were, a common meeting ground for all classes of society. With his ubiquitous sense of theater, Ophuls faithfully follows Maupassant's description of the procession to the Communion. But, as an extra fillip, he briefly shows the choirboys and church dignitaries as they change into their surplices in an improvised "backstage" dressing room—an irresistibly provocative scene, which portrays a small church courtyard dominated by a large statue of the Virgin Mary. This backstage glimpse is Ophuls' signature and can be found in almost all his works.

Inside the church, Ophuls employs his familiar voyeuristic approach by separating the communicants from the congregation (and from the film audience) by another series of dismembering grilles which permit only partial and interrupted glimpses of the communicants. And as his restless camera sweeps the church, it rests on a cherub-like head, a replica of the one we saw above the doorway of Madame's establishment. Moreover, it is Rosa's avalanche of tears and abandon which trigger the melting of the congregation: again the temporary fusion of the sacred and the profane. Imagery has brought prostitutes and communicants together, much as Rivet's daughter elicits Rosa's mothering: Where does the world of innocence begin or end?

With the priest's final blessing, in which he pays special tribute to the "ladies," we are conscious of the parallel roles of Madame and the curé in Maupassant and Ophuls. The religious ceremony has served more than one function; it has occasioned an actual confirmation. When he transports the flock back to the station, Ophuls' Joseph Rivet pays a sad farewell to Rosa but announces his intention of coming to see her—at her maison. The empty horse cart, decked with flowers picked along the way and wilting now, has the appearance of a funeral hearse as Joseph drives slowly out of frame. The women are equated with flowers, joy, and life; their absence occasions frustration in the town and mourning in the village. Sexuality is posited as a locus of fertility rather than a harbinger of damnation and regret.

With the return of the women, the story's triptych is completed. Their reoccupation of the maison is an occasion for celebration, high spirits, and a return to normalcy in the town. In this last jubilant scene Ophuls adheres closely to Maupassant's text. The festivities become positively bacchanalian; flowers are strewn everywhere and champagne flows. Throwing her Norman prudence to the winds, Madame charges only six francs for a bottle of champagne instead of the customary ten. We are voyeurs again as Ophuls pans his camera in a last long sweep of the house; we hear the music and laughter but can glimpse only fragments of the movement and frenetic activity taking place inside. Like Joseph Rivet, we too yearn to enter this emblem of life from which we remain gently excluded.

For anyone familiar with Ophuls' work, the choice of Maupassant as a literary source may seem at first incongruous, since the philosophies and attitudes of the two are so much at variance. What did Ophuls have in common with Maupassant's chilling denial of almost anything pertaining to sensitivity or human love?⁷ Why not rather Stendhal whom Ophuls greatly admired?⁸

Ophuls' genre is the analysis of character, preferably in a fin de siècle setting, with the license to metamorphose, tamper, and probe. He selects only those events of the textual macrocosm which help light up and explore the complexities of the human microcosm. Thus, Maupassant's misanthropic view of the human condition furnishes a fruitful foil; a harsh working against the grain, so to speak. Ophuls will take Maupassant's drabs and peasants and raise them to almost noble proportions. While remaining cannily cognizant of the frailties of human nature and the grossly sexual elements of passion, he will still turn Maupassant's dross to a hue which almost resembles gold.

In effect, Ophuls always manages to pay homage to the idealizing possibilities of love, even when he is sketching the compulsive vagaries of lust, even amid the ironies of an almost overwrought sophistication. It is that balance between idealistic yearnings and a knowing cynicism which distinguishes his work not only from Maupassant's but from almost every other artist's; it is that balance—reflected in the ambiguous overarching title of this film—which remains the unchallenged glory of Ophuls in the French cinema.

NOTES

¹ Henry James, Partial Portraits (Ann Arbor, 1970), p. 252.

² Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, ed. Artine Artinian (New York, 1955), p. 43.

³ Mila Parély (Raphaelle) and Paulette Dubost (Fernande) play respectively Geneviève and Lisette in Jean Renoir's masterpiece, Rules of the Game (1939).

⁴ Paul Willemen, "The Ophuls Text: A Thesis" in Ophuls, ed. P. Willemen (London, 1978), p. 71.

⁵ Maupassant, p. 46.

⁶ Particular attention should be paid to Ophuls' use of the train in Madame de and in Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948).

⁷ Frederick G. Green, French Novelists, from the Revolution to Proust (New York, 1964). Green emphasizes that Maupassant is capable of pity and compassion but remarks: "As a rule De Maupassant's men and women are actuated by greed of money or sexual desire. Love, even in its most ideal form, is always with him fundamentally sexual" (p. 294).

⁸ Molly Haskell makes the important point that "Madame de is closer to the world of Stendhal, both in style and its harsh view of risk and redemption, than Claude Autant-Lara's film of The Red and the Black." ("Madame de: A Musical Passage," in Favorite Movies, ed. Philip Nobile [New York, 1973], p. 144.)