Having screened Schnitzler’s play Carousel in 1950, Max Ophüls used the technique of clutching novels in the film Pleasure. But now he took three Maupassant novels, seemingly connected by the theme of pleasure. However, it seems that it is not the pleasure itself. The meeting of Ophüls and Maupassant is natural: both turn to the principle of objectivity, not too psychologizing their characters and not taking the plot beyond a strict and transparent narrative. The main thing that catches the eye is the conceptual connection between the beautiful and the disgusting, which worried the writer and which the director transferred to the film. Here is an old man hiding behind an ugly, artificial mask of a young man who risks getting his heart broken at the next cabaret dances, but still strives there, because he cannot agree with fate, the run of time, which deprived him of girl attention. But the voyage in order to dispel the ladies of very light behavior from no less easy on morals house in a provincial town, where in the evening rushes almost the entire male half. Or it is a young artist who can not stand the fact that his love was, like everyone else, a young lady, and not a dream muse.
But the film is not dominated by satire, as it may seem by the logic of such plots. That is, in the first case it is noticeable, but it is rather an image of vulgarity, terrible youthful old age, as in the book of Thomas Mann. The second plot completely deviates from the negative intonation. Rather, it is a lyrical part, a conversation about how the banal departure beyond the measured and always one-dimensional life gives it, of course, not another dimension, but a sense of the best that is still possible. The third plot is quite dramatic, because the act of the heroine, and the reaction to it of the hero is not subtracted from the current situation.
So Ophuls is polyphonic. When asking about pleasure, he does not forget about frustration of consciousness. Characteristically, at the very center of this satisfaction/dissatisfaction complex is always the feminine. It defines in a Freudian way what attraction is and how it does not allow life to flow smoothly and calmly, periodically setting it a certain turn, regardless of whether it begins or approaches the end.