We're revisiting the 1951 film year in the lead up to the next Supporting Actress Smackdown. As always Nick Taylor will suggest a few alternatives to Oscar's ballot.
Each writer here at The Film Experience has our checklist of cinematic fetishes. Those qualities we look out for whenever we watch a film, a list of glories we breathlessly recite the way Nicole Kidman talks about going to the movie theater in her Nobel Prize-winning AMC ad. Cinematography so elegant the camera moves like silk. Depictions of sex that recognize it as a real human connection, something that can be playful and disatisfying, and is worth as much consideration in the buildup and the comedown as when it’s happening. Beautiful, immaculately assembled people gliding around gorgeous locales and gleefully succumbing to their libidos. Actresses fulfilling roles that are equal parts familiar archetypes and fleshy, hot-blooded individuals (you know I’m a sucker for this one). And on that note, let’s kick off our look of 1951’s alternate supporting actresses miniseries with a belatedly imported joint from France herself: the lovely ladies of Max Öphuls’ sexy, ephemeral La Ronde...
La Ronde follows a daisy-chain structure, as ten characters (five men and five women) take turns hopping from one sexual escapade to the next. Each section follows one man and one woman. All of it is presided by Anton Walbrook’s plummy narrator, who pops briefly into each story and speaks to the audience from a merry-go-round. Everything that makes these women as unique and sparkling as a gem owes a great deal to the variations and appetites built into how Öphuls directs and writes each role. There’s no way they couldn’t be ravishing, yet the actresses deserve full credit for synchronizing themselves to La Ronde’s wavelength while deepening their respective roles. The actress who starts La Ronde’s daisy chain is also the one who it ends on, so for the sake of conveniently organizing this write-up I’ll save her for last.
Therefore, our first guest is Simone Simon as Marie, a maid who chooses to spend her Saturday night on the dance floor with a soldier named Franz. The two soon dash outside arm-in-arm to a park behind the venue, looking for a private enclave to get better acquainted. While Franz spends most of the walk looking for an unoccupied bench, Marie looks mainly at him, grinning like a cat and teasing him for spending more time dancing with an ugly blonde girl than her. Simon makes that attention into something monogamous rather than a playboy or operator tracking her conquest across the dance floor. Simon watches him with a twinkle in her eye, pouncing eagerly on his lap when they finally find a place for heavy petting. Marie also expects him to stick around afterwards, and asks without a hint of flirtatiousness if he could walk her home.
Alas, the soldier wants to keep dancing. Marie sits dejectedly by herself, and the MC offers her his arm, whisking her two months into the future where she’s happily employed as a maid to some high-society family. She’s also set on consummating a relationship with the handsome, nervous son Alfred, who keeps finding reasons to invite her to his study but can’t quite get up the nerve to proposition her. Marie bemusedly complies with his orders, keeping up her grin without looking openly salacious or breaking from the formal postures of her job. Simon silently conveys how much Marie appreciates Alfred’s candid, blustering interest in her - perhaps this buildup is even part of the fun. There’s a new shade of satisfaction in Marie’s voice after they’re dressed again, a new glow to her even as Alfred sprints out the door to some society thing. After all, how can he get away from her when they live in the same house?
But the young master has more in mind than his chambermaid, which brings us to our next heroine: Danielle Darrieux as Emma, a gorgeous society wife who is beginning an affair with Alfred. She arrives at his apartment just before six, and as soon as Alfred removes her hat and invites her to sit with him, Emma pleads that if he truly loves her he must let her leave. Rest assured, she doesn’t feel bad about adultery. But is it wise for her to be with this boy so spontaneously? Does she really want to be here? Darrieux, like the soldier before her, is not particularly insistent on eye contact, but her remoteness and ambivalence projects a woman sifting through her own thoughts rather than one hungrily imagining other options. When she looks at poor Alfred, you can see she’s really considering him and what he means for her. At no cost to her piquancy and charm, Emma’s gaze and demeanor towards her suitor blur the line between sympathy and pity, though she’s got even more to spare for herself as she flits between the exit and the bedroom.
The next time we see her, Emma is already in bed. Husband and wife each have their own bed, a parody of a Hays Code American couple that Öphuls uses to indicate their utter disinterested in each other sexually. Her husband Charles contentedly talks about the ebbs and flows of their marriage, and Emma nods along absentmindedly, turning over memories in her head. Both of them talk around affairs they’ve had throughout their marriage, and where Charles blusters to hide his infidelities, Emma uses poker-faced denials and what-if scenarios of married friends. Darrieux is hysterical here, using her eyes to punctuate faux-innocence around her questions and knowing exactly when to break her reserved expression as when she gasps at the news of a woman’s death. Darrieux’s overall impression is of a pensive, inward woman, clearly thinking at every moment yet opaque enough that we can’t be entirely confident of what’s happening in her head, even as the actress makes Emma’s curiosities and privacies as entertaining as her hornier co-stars.
Some time later, Charles goes to dinner with a young woman named Anna, played by Odette Joyeux, whom the MC halfheartedly dubs “The Shopgirl” even though she doesn’t work. They go to a private room in a very fancy restaurant, where the husband orders dinner and dessert. Anna is quite besotted with the wine, and drinks heartily as she converses with her suitor about their interests, their company, their respective ages (she’s nineteen, and he’s “a few years above thirty”). Joyeux doesn’t overplay voraciousness, yet her pleasure is always front and center as she savors her meals and listens to her sugar daddy bluster away and ask her questions. The food is clearly more important than her host, though Joyeux conveys the sense that Anna wouldn’t suffer a wholly unamusing man even for a meal.
After dessert is finished and the bottle of wine is empty, Anna flops onto a huge couch and invites Charles to lie down with her. This will net her an apartment on his dime, though she’s happy to spend her nights in another man’s house. Anna goes on a date with a poet named Robert who turns her every word into a profound expression of the human condition, and she is completely baffled by this particular mode of praise. If Joyeux is too stunned by his enthusiasm to get turned on, she’s perfectly capable of being swept up in his arousal. And once they’ve had each other on the floor, she seems more enthusiastic with his prose without quite understanding it any better.
Robert makes an identical approach towards Isabel Miranda’s Charlotte, a haughty, fierce actress who’s leading his newest show and is wholly unimpressed by his frenetic attitudes. As she removes her stage makeup and gets herself ready for a night out, the two spend most of their conversation needling each other. More accurately, he begs her to go away with him, and she mocks his hyperboles and minimizes his talents without looking up much from her mirror. Plenty of cinematic couples antagonize each other as foreplay, but Miranda’s carnality suggests she might devour this man like a praying mantis. The first act of physical contact we see is them slapping each other in the face, after which they passionately embrace.
Miranda, the oldest of the actresses and third-oldest in the cast, distinguishes Charlotte as the most unabashedly carnal character in La Ronde. Where Simon enjoys watching Alfred talk themselves into ravishing her, Miranda basks in expressing her desires and inspiring her lovers into action. Charlotte is especially salacious with her second guest, a visiting count, who she goads into admitting he planned on sleeping with her that night while laying on her bed and stroking his sheathed sword. She knows what she wants and when she wants it, and Miranda’s pristine beauty amplifies her shamelessness - the question is not if she’s fucking tonight, but when. It feels entirey appropriate that the moment she inspires the count into her bed leads to the single funniest transition from a sex scene in the whole film. You know she’s nasty with it.
Afterwards, Charlotte invites the count to pick her up after her show for round two, but he instead goes on a drunken bender with his dog and wakes up in the bed of a prostitute named Léocadie. She is played by Simone Signoret, who bookends La Ronde with its fullest, most rewarding character. Léocadie is introduced spinning on the Narrator’s carousel, her porcelain stillness resembling a mannequin. He leads her off and guides her into La Ronde’s first story. Signoret immediately puts on the veneer of an aloof, seductive lady of the night, beckoning towards the soldier Franz and inviting him to warm up at her place. He refuses and keeps walking, but she follows along, her pace growing more frantic as she tries to get his attention, until she offers herself for free. Léocadie says she doesn’t charge soldier boys, but Signoret conveys a frightened loneliness and need behind her claim. Maybe it really is policy, but Signoret reveals a desperate desire for human connection in her banter, her compromises, and her furies.
Léocadie pulls Franz under a staircase for a quickie and emerges with her hair askew and her face alight, high on the interaction until he refuses to give her his name or a cigarette. She howls like a banshee as he flees, and the echo comically follows him all the way back to base. We get a stiller, sadder version of Léocadie’s desire for connection in the final story, as Charlotte’s count wakes up in her apartment and hastily bids retreat while she looks forlornly from her bed. We never see more of her than her face and arms, yet Signoret’s fine-grained expressions and comportments, the way she stares up at him as he debates aloud how much she resembles someone he knows, convey such quietly distilled states of longing, embarrassment, and comfort. This can’t have been how she wanted this night to go, yet she still seems sad to watch the count depart. How lonely is she, and just how long has she felt like this?
La Ronde is the kind of sumptuously assembled film where each element fits so perfectly into a unique vision that one's tempted to wave each individual contribution as simply part of the whole. But, especially in this context, to do so would nullify what each of these women have brought to roles that need the specificity, zest, and insight a seasoned performer can bring. The characters these actresses etch are as unforgettable as the most elegant compositions and exquisite sets to be found in the film, expanding and re-defining the terms and desires of sex and connection as Öphuls presents them without losing the simplicity and directness he requires. There would be no La Ronde without them.
La Ronde is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and is available for rental on Amazon.