Like Ophuls’s other French-language films of the 1950s, this is an opulent spectacle, the frame filled with lavish mise-en-scène and decadent characters whose perch at the upper stratum of society would seem to render them superficial, but in fact underscores the universality of love, passion, and the conflict they engender. The film’s heightened sense of emotion is perfectly modulated by Ophuls’s precise framing and fluid camerawork, which cohere with the beauty of a perfectly tuned waltz into what is clearly one of the masterworks of the French “Cinema of Quality.” (DVD)