an endless dance
by Douglas Messerli
Jacques Natanson and Max Ophüls (screenplay,
based on the play by Arthur Schnitzler), Max Ophüls (director) La Ronde / 1950
The most recent translator Nicholas Rudall,
disliking the notion of being "handed-around"—since it implies the
idea of the possible disease of syphilis, the interpretation of that which has
delimited discussion of the work's themes—takes his nod from Max Ophüls’ great
film rendition of 1950, La Ronde, which
retains the concept of the dance while including other "circles" such
as the circle of friends that make up the sexual partners of the play. Frankly,
one of the weakest aspects of Ophüls' film, for me, is the constant repetition
throughout of waltz music, a carousel motif, and even images of the frames of
film itself as they weave through the spool of the projector. Personally, I
prefer the German title, or even that of the original English, with its social
connotations of being handed around or even handed-off, if one can forget that
it calls up venereal disease.
It is, in fact, in Scenes 4 and 5, that the play truly comes alive, and
begins to intimate Schnitzler's true concerns. Part of the method that the
young wife uses to arouse her would-be lover is to question him, not only about
his own past, but his affairs with other women, his own position in
relationship to sex. While this is not completely an innocent series of
inquiries, we also feel that she is seeking for some sort of understanding, if
not about sexuality in general, at least about her own feelings and her own break
with cultural taboos. This becomes more apparent in the next scene, where we
come to understand the cause of her frustrations—her business-man husband is
much older than she and his sexual relations might be described as a purposeful
on-and-off again activity, what he describes as an attempt to keep the
honeymoon alive!
He cannot even imagine that she might be unfaithful, and insists that
she should dessert any woman acquaintance who might possibly even be thought able
to do such a thing. Yet she insistently questions him, it is clear, just to
comprehend why these situations occur. Has he ever had sex with a married
woman? He grumpily admits that he has—before meeting her. But we see in the
very next scene that he is still not himself adverse to having extra-marital
affairs.
All of these sexual couplings are heterosexual, in part, because
Schnitzler intentionally presents relationships in which men and women are
quite equal, at least in terms of their hypocrisy.
In the final scene, the Count awakens in the room of the Prostitute, not
even knowing who she is or where he is, and certain, given his drunken
condition, that the woman in the bed and he have never had sex. The only thing
he remembers is that he was in his carriage with his friend Louis. In a final series
of questions, he reminds me of the stock-gay-figure: the straight-man who gets
drunk to have sex with homosexual men, conveniently forgetting everything come
morning.
COUNT: (stops) Listen,
tell me something. Doesn't it mean
anything to you
anymore?
WHORE: What?
COUNT: I mean, don't
you have any pleasure doing it anymore?
WHORE: (yawning) I
need some sleep.
.......
COUNT: Last
night...tell me. Didn't I just collapse on the sofa
right away?
WHORE: Of course you
did....with me.
COUNT: With
you...well, I...
WHORE: But you passed
right out.
Love, even pleasure, is missing from most of these encounters. It's the
interchange accomplished through the revolutions of the dance and the attendant
dizziness that matters. Schnitzler's consistent term "blackout" at
the moment of sexual contact, as established in the play itself, is the perfect
device in that it indicates the unimportance of the act itself.
Early in the play the Maid with her soldier cries out just before the sexual
act, "I can't see your face." In a 1982 translation by Sue Barton,
the Soldier retorts, "What's my face got to do with it," while Rudall
simplifies the Soldier's words into a question: "My face?!"* I am not
interested in judging which translation is better here—Judall's translation
seems to me to be a muscular, performable version—but the former does remind me
of the title of the famed Tina Turner song, "What Does Love to Do with
It?" which I couldn't get out my head while reading this work.
The characters of Schnitzler's play talk endlessly of love, but it's the
sex they are after, and, in the end, it is their search for it that spins them
off a life-long dance. The moment he finishes with the young maid, the soldier
returns to the dance hall. The young wife returns to her husband after her
dalliance with the young man. The Count surely is reunited with his friend Louis,
uncertain whether or not anything happened with the sleepy prostitute, who
reminds him of someone he has met long ago, perhaps the actress of the previous
scene. In the end, Schnitzler's world is not so much an immoral one as it is a
society of dissatisfied beings.
*Marya Mayne's 1917 English-language
translation represents the Soldier's line as, "Face, hell!"
Los Angeles, August 12, 2010
Reprinted from Rain
Taxi (online edition Winter 2010/2011) / revised February 12, 2024.
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