One of the most
lastingly elegant and piercing films of its era, Max Ophuls’ La signora di
tutti fully realizes the tragically ironic paradox implicit in its title,
that if the signora belongs to all, she belongs to no one, least of all to herself.
Isa Miranda, perfectly embodying the character’s journey from exploited
innocence to doomed fatalism, plays Gaby, early in the film expelled from
school after a scandal where a professor killed himself over her (we don’t see
the professor, and it seems clear that she did little or nothing to encourage
him, the first in the film’s succession of doomed romantic imbalances). She’s
invited to a party by a young man, Roberto, who might be the potential love of
her life, all the more so after his disabled mother also becomes fond of her,
and then largely dependent on her. But Roberto’s financier father also falls for her, messing
things up, leading to family tragedy and his financial ruin; she flees and
eventually becomes a movie star, without of course finding the happiness to
match the image. Roberto briefly reenters her life and she starts to think
there may be a way back for them, but it turns out he’s married her estranged
sister instead; however, he tells her, he’ll still see her, onscreen in her
latest film, once it reaches them. Of course, despite Ophuls’ satirical
approach to the film industry’s calculations and mercantilism, his feeling for
the medium is peerless, alert to the entire visual possibilities of the
narrative space, deeply attuned to emotional fragility and longing. But even as
this lends the film a sense of expansive possibility, there’s a persistent
offsetting gravity, a sense that nothing can ever be entirely consigned to the
past. In this regard too, Gaby’s allure is that of cinema itself, in a film that
speaks deeply to its moment, and barely any less to our own.
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