Film

Here’s a perfect example of a movie that requires a big screen to bloom—and bloom it does, into something fairly extraordinary. At home (in admittedly washed-out video transfers), director Max Ophüls’s final film only reveals its limitations. The buxom Martine Carol, playing the title character, a 19th-century dancer and the first celebutante, is a basically inert actor, stranded in Ophüls’s compositions. Scenes in which Carol is supposed to be charming are logy, and even the German auteur’s effortlessly floating camera feels sluggish. Famously, Andrew Sarris called Lola Montès the greatest film of all time, yet it’s not even Ophüls’s best, nowhere close to the mastery of The Earrings of Madame de… or Letter from an Unknown Woman.

But in a revelatory new print from the Cinémathèque Française, a mysterious and wonderful alchemy occurs. Suddenly, Lola seems more of a victim, dwarfed by events and men. (The clarity of the restoration turns even Carol’s facial immobility and woodenness into an asset, emphasizing her self-objectification: a tossed-away puppet.) More to the point, Lola Montès bum-rushes you with the hyperactivity of its spectacle. A circus-set framing device, which features ringleader Peter Ustinov presenting his female treasure to a crowd (and to us), has a buzzy vulgarity when supplied with size and, more notably, enhanced color. Red lights bathe certain moments in whorish desperation. Tiny color-coordinated imps, clowns in the performance, run toward the lens. Even the purple cuffs of Ustinov’s jacket give off a radioactive glow, part of his salesman’s pitch.

Lola Montès could never be confused for realism in any format: home video, theater or iPod. But its effectiveness as a tragedy relies on Ophüls setting out a luxurious spread for his hapless heroine. When Lola comes closest to serenity, in the Bavarian Alps with doting King Ludwig I (Walbrook), the deep-blue skies and decadent palace interiors play a crucial role, as they do during her frantic exile, with revolutionaries beating down the door. She may not be meant for this world, but we can finally see it in all its splendor.