In the strange Earrings of Madame de …, a lonely woman, cloistered in an upper-class existence of endless soirées and empty finery, sells the pair of diamond earrings her husband gave her on their wedding day; the unnamed heroine needs spending money to cavort with her long queue of suitors. Oddly enough, the earrings make a complete circle, going from jeweler back to husband, from him to his mistress, then lost gambling in a casino, then back to our eponymous Madame (given to her by the paramour with whom she eventually falls in love). Max Ophüls’s moving 1953 picture is not so much an indictment of upper-class mores (both husband and wife make no secrets of their affairs), as it is an examination of the complex trappings of love, jealousy, and marriage.
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