Ronde, La (1950)
“The only joy is to meet someone to love.”
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Genres, Themes, Actors, and Directors:
Response to Peary’s Review:
He describes the film as “broken into several vignettes featuring a romantic sexual interlude between a man and a woman,” with “each vignette contain[ing] one character from the previous segment.” So, “when a husband and wife lie in bed speaking of fidelity:
… we have the advantage of having earlier seen her in an affair:
… and knowing that we’ll see him with his mistress in the following sequence.”
Peary writes that “Ophüls’s women glow; their actions are determined by their hearts — and they never hold back from a sexual liaison or feel guilt afterward. They are the personifications of love; they know its glories.”
On the other hand, “Ophüls’s men, while no buffoons, can’t appreciate love except on a physical level — they are always setting up rules, demanding loyalty, asking questions, thinking too much.” He ends his review by noting that “Simone Signoret is especially appealing — and beautiful — as a prostitute who is willing to give herself to soldiers for free”:
(though she arguably has too little screentime, despite appearing in both bookend liaison stories). This soufflé of a “bedroom farce” — provocative enough to U.S. censors for its release to be held up until 1954 — remains worth a look as the first of Ophüls’s four later European outings. Notable Performances, Qualities, and Moments:
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