影片主要內(nèi)容有兩段：一段是少女蘿拉拒絕嫁給年老的伯爵，讓她父親的副官娶她，但婚后她的丈夫追逐別的女人，她毅然離開他，開始了獨(dú)立自由的生活。另一段是蘿拉到巴伐利亞去演出，被國(guó)王愛上，與國(guó)王在一起的一段生活。后來(lái)蘿拉為了國(guó)王的王權(quán)安全，毅然離開巴伐利亞。蘿拉是那個(gè)時(shí)代不甘被命運(yùn)擺布的女子，但最后卻不得不在馬戲團(tuán)里像一只動(dòng)物一樣被人驅(qū)使賺錢。影片結(jié)尾，蘿拉被關(guān)在籠子里，讓觀眾排隊(duì)去撫摸和親手，馬戲團(tuán)對(duì)觀眾每人收取1塊錢。她遭受的恥辱令人感同身受。

To speak the unspeakable --

1. On history and movement:
“Life for me is . . . a movement,” says the movie’s Lola. “My life is whirling in my head,” she frets. Few would have been surprised if Ophuls—the bard of pictorial motion, whose camera doesn’t simply permit us to see but rather, like an enthusiastic friend, pulls us into the whirl of life—had made those statements about himself. Yet his Lola is far removed from history’s spitfire dervish. If Lola Montès is a film infatuated with motion, its heroine is often a study in motion denied. This is nothing like a conventional movie biography. It is, instead, a profound meditation on the presumptions and limitations of all biography. So much has been written about the director’s virtuosity that relatively little is said about his scrupulous treatment of truth, power, gender, compromise, the selling of the self.

2. On objectification:
Carol, however, turned out to be a blessing, though admittedly this is a minority view. Her stony beauty encouraged Ophuls to objectify Lola in a way that would not have been possible with a more expressive actor. This is a film that is often intent on keeping its emotional distance. In transforming the immodestly blonde Carol into a corseted brunette, Ophuls created an image surprisingly close to portraits of the real Lola, while emphasizing the cryptic nature of sexual allure. Had he been able to hire Gina Lollobrigida, he might have given us the spider dance Lola; with Danielle Darrieux, Jeanne Moreau, or Ingrid Bergman, he might have given us a contemplative, flirtatious, commanding Lola. With Carol, he presents Lola as a prisoner of sex, and draws a cinematic line—a tracking shot, of course—between the waxen object of our curiosity and her unknowable interior life.

The real Montez gave lectures, receiving a higher fee than Dickens during their respective American tours. But she never appeared in a circus or toured as a sideshow act, unlike other notorious figures, from Robert Ford to Evelyn Nesbit to the fallen stars of today’s talk show confessionals. No, the circus is Ophuls’s inspired tour de force, its skull-like claustrophobia heightened by the absence of a single shot to place it in the larger world. We enter the big top at the start, and exit when the camera forces us backward, away from the arena, at which point a curtain shuts us out. There is no outside, no reality beyond the tent and Lola’s memory.

3. On prostitution and capitalism:
The business of prostitution hovers over this film, but Ophuls makes a clear distinction between prostituting one’s body (in Ophulsian theology, a venial sin at most) and selling one’s soul (a mortal sin at least). Ophuls loves Lola, and whatever the real Lola was, his Lola is not a whore, not even a courtesan. True, she will get a palace from her Bavarian king, but the film depicts theirs as a genuine love match. Elsewhere, sex is a means of escape or an escapade in pleasure. Money does not change hands. Not until she descends, in the ringmaster’s phrase, “from kingdom to carnival,” sacrificing sexual independence and the possibility of love (however fleeting) for the commerce of show business, does she put herself on the market.

Ophuls had nothing against whores; he treats them with humor and respect in La ronde and Le plaisir. He was, however, impatient with soulless capitalism, as in his early Dutch film Comedy of Money, in which a singing ringmaster explicates corruption in the market. By 1955, Ophuls had endured his own experience with ballyhoo in Hollywood, and it is tempting to see Lola as a fragile artiste at the mercy of the machinations of callous producers.

4. On feminist autonomy and power:
By beginning the flashback sequences with Liszt, the film establishes Lola as an adventuress with celebrity connections while showing that, far from being on the make, she possesses a mature sense of love’s labors and the tussle for power that is the price of emancipation—an issue played out repeatedly as she flees her mother, her husband, and Bavarian mobs. The ringmaster will later tell her: “Talent doesn’t interest me . . . only power and efficiency.”

For Ophuls’s purposes, the student shows that Lola dispenses her favors freely and inspires fierce loyalty, representing to the fraternal revolutionaries “l(fā)ove, freedom, everything [the conservatives] detest!”

Ophuls will not let us see Lola dance—neither her unsuccessful audition (her maid remarks, “As always, they didn’t like the bolero”) nor her royal performance (we see the king tapping his fingers in time); nor do we get to see her illustrious breasts (we get extended business about finding a needle and thread to sew up her ripped bodice). But Lola is no longer a waxen figure! The Lola who on the Riviera dashed to confront her lover’s wife now predominates, as she gallops to meet the king, and charms him with a single step of a Spanish fandango—no more than a pose, really.

5. On success and worthiness:
The sixth and final movement is itself a circus trick. Lola, a ghost of her former self, must perform the climax of her act, which we learn she has been doing for an astonishing four months—astonishing because even a top acrobat in the best of health would have trouble diving from a high-wire platform onto an object no larger than a mattress. This, we are told, she has done show after show without a net. Lola is dizzy, wavering, colorless; she has no more chance of surviving her fall than Scottie does his in the preamble to Vertigo. But, of course, she does survive, promptly resurrected as a captive in the menagerie, selling kisses for a dollar, pimped out to the end. Yet can anyone doubt that Lola remains triumphant, an object of veneration for all trusting suckers everywhere, including Max Ophuls, who believed that character is a kind of talent? His camera tracks back for a hundred glorious seconds before he allows the curtain to be drawn, leaving Lola in peace, or at least enjoying the bliss of celebrity homage, until, once more, we hit “Play” and return to the big top.

6. On the film itself:
It was as if Orson Welles had made a movie of Camille with Betty Grable in the lead, but with all the intricate flashbacks, visual pyrotechnics and distancing ironies of Citizen Kane.

       巴洛克式的古典主義的繁重，在一個(gè)不甘于向命運(yùn)妥協(xié)的悲劇人物身上，隱喻出歐洲的落寞之感，最后共鳴于悲觀的存在主義。
    講究的場(chǎng)面調(diào)度，深焦攝影，寬銀幕在單幅的畫面上敘事信息量和視覺信息量都有提升，從最外在提升了影片的節(jié)奏感。巴洛克的繁復(fù)和形式的美感從內(nèi)而外流露。
    但是如此高的資金投入，所回饋的視覺饕鬄盛宴，我認(rèn)為還欠缺更多。
    在劇作上，勞拉蒙特斯這個(gè)人物具不具有可塑造的必要性，典型性。人物鮮明與否。在塑造人物，由人物產(chǎn)生的悲劇共鳴中，對(duì)環(huán)境的塑造有沒有到位。勞拉蒙特斯個(gè)人認(rèn)為不是一個(gè)典型性的人物，從人物的劇作塑造上特別一般，因?yàn)楦赣H的戰(zhàn)死家庭沒落，母親淫蕩，和母親中意的副官結(jié)婚，婚后追尋芭蕾舞，其中有若干個(gè)情人，得到了權(quán)利的巔峰，最后沒落于美國(guó)的大馬戲團(tuán)。在劇作的環(huán)境場(chǎng)景塑造上，人物缺乏內(nèi)涵，人物內(nèi)在的實(shí)質(zhì)空洞，人物缺乏環(huán)境的推動(dòng)力，人物缺乏內(nèi)在的戲劇性，人物經(jīng)歷太過于俗氣。
    古典主義，有古典主義敘事的狹隘，若拍攝時(shí)注重人物的表現(xiàn)，注重一定的渲染，這個(gè)電影也許走的更遠(yuǎn)，至少，我覺得勞拉夢(mèng)特斯和安娜卡列尼娜，戰(zhàn)爭(zhēng)與和平那種電影里的人物缺乏大氣。
    視覺上的沖擊力做的還是蠻不錯(cuò)的。單幅畫面達(dá)到敘事能量的最大是很好的教學(xué)材料。對(duì)稱的美感，布景和色調(diào)對(duì)敘事的推動(dòng)......
    
    
    

美輪美奐，色彩明艷而典雅，鏡頭講究，極小的細(xì)節(jié)都一絲不茍，用閃回的方式講述人物生平免去了平鋪直敘的乏味。許多情節(jié)拍得不疾不徐十分耐看，比如和國(guó)王的初會(huì)，暴亂，馬戲團(tuán)的販賣艷史……手法純熟，功力深厚。且全片洋溢一種古典時(shí)代才有的格調(diào)與情懷。

遺憾的是我對(duì)卡洛的羅拉無(wú)甚感覺。不是不美，也不是演得不好，而是在我看來(lái)她長(zhǎng)得實(shí)在是常規(guī)，這樣的模樣怎會(huì)符合“傾國(guó)傾城孽?；ā钡氖⒚?？難道在歐洲人眼里，此類端莊到好像沒啥特點(diǎn)的名媛才是貴族口味？.....我覺得愛娃加德納的類型更神似，又或者愛娃妖艷了些，那玉婆那樣的也符合......

總之這點(diǎn)導(dǎo)致我對(duì)影片建立不起真正念念難忘的觀感，盡管彼得的角色非常出彩，而安東飾演的國(guó)王更讓我眼前一亮，但麻木于女主魅力始終是致命的缺失~~

必須要重提的是，影片的場(chǎng)景真的很出色，包括馬戲團(tuán)的數(shù)場(chǎng)戲，設(shè)計(jì)得十分精致，絢麗，夢(mèng)幻……值得一看。



《看電影》里說(shuō)，此片作為馬克斯的最后一部電影，透露出對(duì)日漸勢(shì)微的歐洲無(wú)盡的惆悵傷懷，我這種膚淺的看客，要自發(fā)聯(lián)想出這層含義實(shí)有難度。倒是勞拉這個(gè)角色對(duì)女性觀眾而言不乏打動(dòng)。傾其一生追逐欲望的勞拉，身歷無(wú)數(shù)危機(jī)關(guān)頭，寧愿流落異國(guó)繁華落盡，也要婉拒嫁做人婦尋常度日，最后那縱身一跳真是百味雜陳，刨去其造孽的過往道德意義上的背逆，這份愿賭服輸?shù)奶┤?，這份始終不肯舍棄的內(nèi)心的顛沛，何其自我，何其忠誠(chéng)，何其徹底。