Max Ophuls’ (or as the credits
have it, Opuls’) The Reckless Moment is a fascinating incursion of noir-ish menace into superficially perfect domesticity, a
thematic precursor of sorts to Blue Velvet. The two worlds cross in the
opening sequence, as Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) drives from her bucolic small
town into the sleazy heart of LA, to confront a low-life who’s dating her
teenage daughter; within days, he’ll be dead, killed by the anchor attached to
the family’s boat, and she’ll be dealing with a blackmailer, in possession of
an intimate stash of letters. Ophuls portrays Lucia’s life as a relentless
treadmill of undisciplined children, an ever-present and largely infantilized
father-in-law (who sleeps in the same room as her young son), runaway expenses,
and limited privacy, whether at home or elsewhere (this being a community where
everyone knows everyone) – the husband’s chronic absence for work, even over
Christmas, underlines the structural imbalances (the film’s treatment of the family’s
black maid Sybil - a major supporting role for which Frances E. Williams goes
scandalously uncredited – might warrant an essay in itself). The blackmailer
Donnelly (the always marvelous James Mason) is as much poignantly would-be
lover as adversary, seeing in Lucia’s life an embodiment of his own failure;
and yet the movie suggests we’re merely observing contrasting forms of
confinement (“You have your family, I have my Nagel,” says Donnelly in one of
the film’s more memorably odd lines, referring to his menacing business
partner) Ophuls presents the house as a spacious, materialist dream, its
underbelly revealed through the vivid play of nighttime shadows. The ending
closes off the incursion, reasserting the family imperative, but underlining
the husband’s continuing absence; Ophuls’ brilliant framing leaves a sense of
submergence and defeat as much as triumph. Further disquiet flows from the
(still relevant) moral question that runs through the movie: how strongly
should the interests of the privileged override the rights of a more visibly
tainted underclass…?
No comments:
Post a Comment