La tendre ennemie / The Tender Enemy

Max Ophuls: La tendre ennemie / The Tender Enemy (1926) starring Simone Berriau.

Max Ophuls: La tendre ennemie / The Tender Enemy (1926) starring Simone Berriau.

Max Ophuls: La tendre ennemie / The Tender Enemy (1926) starring Simone Berriau.

Max Ophuls: La tendre ennemie / The Tender Enemy (1926) starring Simone Berriau.

Hellä vihollinen / Älskad av tre män.
    FR 1936. PC: Éden Productions. P: Max Ophuls.
    D: Max Ophuls, assisté de Ralph Baum. SC: Curt Alexander, Max Ophuls – dialogues: André-Paul Antoine - based on the play L'Ennemie by André-Paul Antoine. Cin: Eugen Schüfftan – b&w – 35 mm – 1,37:1 – mono. Assisté de René Colas (Wikipédia) / [Henri Alekan (IMDb)]. AD: Jacques Gotko. Makeup: Hagop Arakelian. M: Albert Wolff. S: Antoine Archimbaud. ED: Pierre de Hérain. Songs:
    – "Hochzeitsmarsch" (aus Ein Sommernachtstraum von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, op. 61 Nr. 9 and Nr. 7, 1843)
    – "Hochzeitsmarsch" / "Treulich geführt" (aus Lohengrin von Richard Wagner, 1850)
    – "Frou-frou" (Hector Monréal, Henri Blondeau, 1897)
    – "Aimer" (the theme song of La tendre ennemie, sung by an opera singer)
    – "Il était un petit navire" (originally un chant de marins, in the 19th century a vaudeville chanson, in the 20th century a children's song)
    C: Simone Berriau (Annette Dupont, l'ennemie), Catherine Fonteney (Mme Dupont), Laure Diana (la Poule), Jacqueline Daix (Line – la fille de l'ennemie), Georges Vitray (M. Dupont), Lucien Nat (le promis), Pierre Finaly (L'oncle Émile), Henri Marchand (l'extra), Maurice Devienne (le fiancé), Camille Bert (Docteur Desmoulins), Marc Valbel (Rodriguo le Vainqueur), Janine Darcey (la cousine), Roger Legris (le Saint-Cyrien), Germaine Reuver (Tante Jette).
    Genre : Comédie, Film d'amour
    69 min
    Festival premiere: 21 Aug 1936 Venice Film Festival.
    Date de sortie : France, 24 octobre 1936
    Finnish Film Archive screening registered at VET 24.4.1987 (16 mm / 710 m / 65 min)
    Corona lockdown viewings.
    A print with an introduction by Fernand-Bastide, Vice Président du Syndicat Francais des Directeurs de Théâtres Cinématographiques.
    Viewed from the MUBI platform, 63 minutes with English subtitles (n.c.), at a forest retreat in Punkaharju on a tv screen, 6 July 2020.

AA: A dream play, a ghost story, a romantic fantasy. Three men appear as ghosts at a young woman's betrothal party, all former lovers of her mother, Annette Dupont, played by a radiant Simone Berriau (1896–1984).

After Hitler's ascent to power Max Ophuls's career became international: in Italy, the Netherlands and France. With La tendre ennemie he became a French film-maker, except for the Hollywood exile during the Nazi occupation.

The subject of La tendre ennemie is Ophulsian: unrequited love in all three affairs of the ghost story, also in all three generations of Annette's story.

Annette's life force is too strong for her husband, Monsieur Dupont, who dies of a heart attack. It is overpowering even for the lion tamer Rodriguo the Invincible. His doctor orders him to take a long rest in Davos. Instead, Annette takes him to Cannes, and, exhausted, Rodriguo perishes in a tiger cage.

The third ghost, the sailor Lucien, is Annette's first love, but Annette's mother prohibits her to go with him, and upon learning this, Lucien shoots himself. Thus starts Annette's career as "the tender enemy" whose lovers meet death. But already the opening credits announce that the true enemy is existence ("la vraie coupable : existence").

The film unfolds as a series of flashbacks during the betrothal party of Line, Annette's daughter, and history is about to repeat itself, as Annette forbids Line to go with her boyfriend, a flyer who performs daredevil tricks in the sky. Familiar lessons are being passed to the next generation: don't burden him with marriage, enter a soulless marriage, don't expect love in marriage.

But when Line flees, Annette shuffles through her box of memories and has a change of heart: "One spoiled life is enough". In fact, many lives have been spoiled. The three ghosts understand that everyone's tragedies started when Annette's first love was denied.

The ghost story is not a new element in Max Ophuls. "Ich schwöre... ich schwöre... dass ich Dich liebe... dass ich Dich ewig liebe" (Liebelei). The presence of ghosts was meaningful in the cinema of the 1930s. A revenant appeared in Liliom, filmed by Frank Borzage and Fritz Lang in the 1930s, and Borzage showed spirits also in the finale of Three Comrades. Abel Gance's both J'accuse films end with parades of ghost soldiers. On the dark side of the Force, The Triumph of the Will also ends with a ghost parade ("marschieren im Geist in unseren Reihen mit").

Self-opening gates and similar phenomena demonstrate that a parallel phantom world is with us. Some invisibility tricks have affinities with James Whale's The Invisible Man (1933). The coexistence of the corporeal and the incorporeal is here at its most prominent in Max Ophuls's cinema of transience.

Much of the film is is seen in superimpositions, but otherwise we are in familiar Ophuls territory: the flashback structure, the long tracking shots, the dancing camera, the rapidly moving backdrops (like the "trip around the world" in Prater in Letter from an Unknown Woman), the fast edit, the montages of life in luxury, the circus world, the private dinner in a carriage where curtains can be lowered, the dizzy spells and headaches. Exceptionally, the finale is victorious. The love of the young Line can be fulfilled, the enemies are reconciled, and the three ghosts are headed for a rendez-vous in the Milky Way.

We arranged the first screening in Finland of La tendre ennemie 33 years ago when we published Claude Beylie's wonderful Max Ophuls book in Finnish, and Beylie himself came to introduce it and our Ophuls retrospective. I believe it was Beylie's own 16 mm print that we screened, from his collection at Cinémathèque Universitaire in Paris.

It was a great pleasure to view La tendre ennemie on MUBI, but the edition on display looked a bit like it, too, might have been struck from a 16 mm source.

NB. Max Ophuls had four names, all valid. He was born bilingual in his beloved Saarland / La Sarre, torn in his childhood and in two wars between Germany and France. As an artist he did not use his birth name Maximilian Oppenheimer to avoid disturbing his distinguished industrialist family. In Germany he used the umlaut form "Ophüls" to ensure correct pronunciation. In Hollywood he was credited as "Opuls". Claude Beylie, who knew Max Ophuls personally, confirmed to us that "Ophuls" was preferred by the artist, although all four ways are correct.

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: THE MUBI INTRO:
BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: THE MUBI INTRO:

MUBI 2020

Synopsis

"Annette is giving an engagement party for her daughter. As a calculating woman, Annette is not marrying her child to her true love but for money. However, the ghosts of her unhappy husband and less happy lover come to watch the party, and conspire to save the younger woman from a loveless future."

Our take

"An elegantly shot drama from Max Ophüls’ The Tender Enemy is a moral tale about how the past often informs the present. A bold experiment in social satire, this entertaining comedy established the trademark flashback structure that would distinguish many of the German-born director’s later films."