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The Marquise of O(Die Marquise von O...)

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West Germany, France · 1976
Rated PG · 1h 42m
Director Éric Rohmer
Starring Edith Clever, Bruno Ganz, Edda Seippel, Peter Lühr
Genre Drama, History

After having been saved from a group of rapists by a valiant count, the Marquise of O finds herself mysteriously pregnant. She sends out an advertisement to beg the father of her child to come forward so she can marry him.

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What are people saying?

Elsa Bauerdick Profile picture for Elsa Bauerdick

I'm not sure who came up with the idea that this would be a good story to adapt, but oh boy. This movie has some beautiful costume pieces and great cinematography but in the end its still a story about a woman who is forced to marry her rapist.

What are critics saying?

40

Washington Post by Gary Arnold

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]

100

Newsweek by Jack Kroll

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]

90

Village Voice by Michael Atkinson

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.

100

The New York Times by Vincent Canby

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.

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