Some people might find La Ronde sweet and romantic, but I just found it to be weak and thus forgettable. The story's innovative structure does not seem so innovative in 2000, and it's not because people have copied it ad infinitum. It is because people have improved upon and perfected the multiple storyline film. Nowadays we have masters like Scorsese and especially Altman who can do this kind of film without trying. Ophuls, though, did not have many (or possibly not any) real precursors to this sort of work. The film progresses very linearly, far too linearly. It begins with two characters, a man and a woman, meeting. Then one character goes on to meet a member of the opposite sex, then the newcomer goes on to another, and so on, until the person whose story did not move on in the first segment is met by the last character we meet, and then FIN. It is so fixed in this structure that it immediately becomes boring. It would have been possible to keep it from becoming boring if the characters had more depth or the stories themselves could have been deeper, but no. In fact, the segments are varied quite a bit in length. One may last for 15 minutes, the next could last 2 minutes. Characters pop in out of nowhere to become the next link in the chain. I just didn't care about anything that happened. Plus, all the men in the film are enormous jerks. They are very misogynistic and use the women of the film in a terrible way. Not to mention the theme song, which is repeated ad nauseam throughout the film, etc, etc...
The only real value to the film was that it did contain some very innovative scenes. I did not like the whole thing with the merry-go-round's breakdown symbolizing a man's impotence. It was a bit tacky, but I can't say that it wasn't inventive. I liked the way the narrator (a character whom I have not discussed; I'll just say I found him annoying and a little creepy) led one of the characters through time. My favorite scene in the film involved a very clever way of cutting out a sex scene: when two characters embrace, there is a cut to the narrator, who is looking at a strip of film, the very film we are watching, and he cuts, on screen, the sex scene. That was clever. Someone should steal it.
All in all, though, La Ronde is pretty inconsequential. I give it a 5/10.
The only real value to the film was that it did contain some very innovative scenes. I did not like the whole thing with the merry-go-round's breakdown symbolizing a man's impotence. It was a bit tacky, but I can't say that it wasn't inventive. I liked the way the narrator (a character whom I have not discussed; I'll just say I found him annoying and a little creepy) led one of the characters through time. My favorite scene in the film involved a very clever way of cutting out a sex scene: when two characters embrace, there is a cut to the narrator, who is looking at a strip of film, the very film we are watching, and he cuts, on screen, the sex scene. That was clever. Someone should steal it.
All in all, though, La Ronde is pretty inconsequential. I give it a 5/10.