The Marquise of O

Rohmer, whose films ("Claire's Knee," "My Night at Maud's") are all about desire chilled in the icebox of custom, has brilliantly reproduced the impact of this rationally irrational story: he captures Kleist's almost surreal effect of a grenade whose exploding fragments somehow arrange themselves into a classically formal pattern. [1 Nov 1976, p.83]

It's a dazzling testament to the civilizing effects of several different arts, witty, joyous and so beautiful to look at that it must seem initially suspect to those of us who have begun to respond to spray-painted subway graffiti as the fine art of our time.

Marquise is almost ironically uninflected, like a tense game of chess. But soon the no-nonsense two-shots and scarlet-satin self-consciousness let the story build to genuine fireworks. No costume-drama escapism here, just distilled social warfare.

Although Rohmer's adaptation, shot in German with a cast of actors drawn from the German stage, is pedantically faithful to the letter of the original - almost word-for-word as well as scene-for-scene - it substitutes a style that seems woefully wrong. Rohmer's approach is too static and repressed to release the comic ironies Kleist perceived in the very premise of an honorable man's lapse leading to an honorable woman's distress and built into his brilliantly objective story-telling style. [21 Jan 1977, p.B15]