Word: coachmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ophuls maintains a balance between scheme and characters by acknowledging and mocking the scheme. The meneur d? jen (Anton Walbrook), who opens the film by addressing the audience, keeps returning to change seenes between the ten episodes which compose the film. His appearances as functionaries-headwaiters, coachmen-are at once pleasantly obvious and sparked by unexpected twists which it would be criminal to reveal. Ophuls similarly keeps a sustained irony from overweighting the episodes, by employing a formal inventiveness remarkably responsive to the nuances of each situation. The subtle differences of class, age, and character of each person affords Ophuls...
...These yardlong glasses once were giv'n to coachmen In their boxes...
...Quiquendone is a study in slow motion. The burgomaster is "phlegm personified." Conversations are punctuated by extended periods of silence. It is a town, says one man, "where there has not been the shadow of a discussion for a century, where the cartmen do not swear, where the coachmen do not insult each other, where horses do not run away, where the dogs do not bite, where the cats do not scratch." For lovers to marry before they have courted languorously for ten years is a scandal...