Le Plaisir

Le Plaisir is a 1952 French black-and-white anthology film directed by Max Ophüls that adapts three short stories by Guy de Maupassant, "Le Masque", "La Maison Tellier", and "Le Modèle", into a single feature linked by a narrator speaking in the voice of Maupassant himself¹. It was made on Ophüls's return to postwar Europe and stands in his late French period between La Ronde (1950) and Madame de… (1953)².

Narration and adaptation

The three stories are connected by a voice-over narrator who presents himself as Guy de Maupassant, voiced by Jean Servais in the original French version¹⁰. He tells the audience that these are "old stories for your modern times", a framing that distances the late nineteenth-century setting while inviting comparison with the present¹⁰. In the American release version Peter Ustinov replaces Servais as the narrator, and the order of the episodes is changed so that "Le Modèle" precedes "La Maison Tellier"².

Ophüls is described as essentially faithful to Maupassant while softening the author's cynicism and misogyny; the film scholar Robin Wood wrote that Maupassant's cynicism looks down on his characters, whereas Ophüls substitutes tenderness and never sets himself apart^{2 • 11}. A scholarly study of the adaptation notes that Ophüls presents a less realistic and naturalistic portrait of the prostitutes than the texts do, and that his most significant divergence is the insertion of Maupassant himself as an intermediate narrator¹².

Style

The film is an exercise in the mobile-camera virtuosity for which Ophüls is known: swirling tracking shots in the dance hall and aerial movements for the exterior view of the Tellier house¹. In the dance hall his gliding, gyrating camera turns the pounding steps of a quadrille into what Brody calls an erotic night-club grind⁹. The critic Claude Beylie described the film as the ideal reconciliation of French impressionism and Germanic baroque¹³.

The Larousse film dictionary reads the film as a moralist's reflection drawing a parallel between pleasure and happiness, "which, for its part, is not gay"¹. That formulation comes from the film's celebrated closing line, "Le bonheur n'est pas gai"¹⁴.

Reception and legacy

The film was reviled at its French premiere as a Germanic travesty of a great national writer; the critic André Bazin used the appearance the same year of André Michel's Maupassant film Trois Femmes to restate his disapproval of Ophüls's extravagant approach¹⁵. More favorable appreciations came later, from Claude Beylie, François Truffaut, and most notably Jean-Luc Godard, who in 1963 placed Le Plaisir at the head of his nominations for "Best French Film since the Liberation"¹⁵. Ophüls answered his critics in a letter to the critic Jean-Jacques Gautier, a document the Film Quarterly author calls a proud, impassioned unfolding of the film's design¹⁵.

Word has it that Le Plaisir was Stanley Kubrick's favorite film; MoMA's Charles Silver points to parallels in the two directors' use of tracking shots and to Kubrick's taste for period precision and decorousness². The film has also been described as suffering neglect because it sits between two of its director's most famous works, much as Chaplin's The Circus sits between The Gold Rush and City Lights².

Restoration and re-release

Gaumont restored the film in 2K from the original negatives with the support of the CNC, and the restored version returned to French cinemas on 6 November 2024 as part of a re-release of Ophüls's late French films alongside Sans lendemain and Madame de…^{7 • 14}. The Criterion Collection issued the film on DVD as spine #444 with a restored high-definition transfer, an introduction by Todd Haynes, and English- and German-language versions of the opening narration³.

Reported running times differ among catalogs: the CNC records 98 minutes⁴, Criterion and the German filmportal list 97 minutes^{3 • 16}, Gaumont lists 93 minutes⁶, and AlloCiné lists 1 hour 37 minutes⁵.

References

1. le Plaisir, Larousse, Dictionnaire mondial des films
2. Charles Silver, Max Ophuls's Le Plaisir, MoMA (2012)
3. Le plaisir (1952), The Criterion Collection
4. LE PLAISIR, fiche oeuvre, CNC Visas et Classification
5. Le Plaisir, Film 1952, AlloCiné
6. Le plaisir, Gaumont
7. Le Plaisir, Les Acacias (restored re-release)
8. Don Groves, Le plaisir Review, SBS (2010)
9. Richard Brody, Le Plaisir, The New Yorker (2012)
10. Le plaisir review, QNetwork
11. Le Plaisir, or Desire for the Absolute, Arrow Films booklet
12. Alfredo Segura Tornero, Le traitement de Madame, les filles et l'ethos discursif de Maupassant dans Le Plaisir de Max Ophuls, Thélème 33(2) 2018
13. Dossier de presse, Les Acacias (2024)
14. Reprise : trois films de Max Ophuls à son apogée, Le Monde (6 November 2024)
15. Le Plaisir: "The Mask" and "The Model", Film Quarterly (2009)
16. Le plaisir, filmportal.de

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Adaptations of literature, stage, and other media › Films based on novels, novellas, and short fiction › Films based on 19th-century classics

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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