The Moviegoer La Ronde at the Harvard Square through Tuesday

THESE DAYS comedies of manners are out of favor, especially those that are deliberately artificial. Jules and Jim gets by because of its apparent faithfulness to lifelike detail and incident. But Truffaut's favorite pastime is to manipulate his audiences. Forcing us to identify with his characters, he hides an attitude toward their actions that shapes our feelings. Ophuls' attitude is continuously present near the surface of La Ronde, constantly making itself felt when the relations between his characters change. And Ophuls judges right. Given the lightness of his characters-any one of whom one sees for a maximum of twenty minutes-a script built on their "love"-relations could easily have become excessively patterned, illustrative only of a rigid scheme of life.

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 sensitivity to social behavior full play.

The same inventiveness gives the film a flavor unique in Ophuls. In general his heavily decorated background settings and firmly placed foreground objects delimit an empty mid-ground where his characters move. Despite his fluid camera motions this spatial plan often imposes upon his characters, notably in Letter from an Unknown Woman and Lola Montes. The introduction of La Ronde tells us that we are in a studio and, after showing us the artificiality of the lighting and sets, invites us to accept them for their beauty, for the pleasant romance of the drama and its trappings. The first episode continues this artificiality by omitting foreground objects and shoving the characters up against backdrops, divorcing their plain flat facial lighting from the elaborate play of shadows on the flat sets. When the characters decide to join this trivial game of love, the bright spots of light dancing on the walls behind them begin to hit their faces, and the circle of love-affairs begins.

THE SECOND episode's equally long tracks begin to place dark foreground objects before the characters, creating a more typical Ophuls space, even as we move from a light comedy (the soldier and the whore) toward more serious affairs. The third is a brilliantly played will-he-or-won't-he-fall skit, full of characters walking to and from each other through luxurious rooms, and using astounding angled shots and hard cuts. The fourth episode involves us in a more deeply felt assignation-and so the drama proceeds. Walbrook's appearances becoming rarer and shorter.

But depth and emotional impact of particular characters are not Ophuls' sole aims. Toward the end, as characters and episodes come faster and the unifies of time and space begin to soften, a certain flattening of emotions increases. In the last episode memory breaks down, events lose their poignancy, and the number of characters prevents deep involvement with any of them. A quality of regret and detachment, of precise character-description without emotional immediacy, leads us out of the drama as it completes its circular plan. Ophuls, like Sirk, believes that art should establish distances.

La Ronde's final fascination lies in the terms on which Ophuls offers his drama to us. His other films enlarge the audience's moral awareness of its experience by developing the implications of their styles. Our enjoyment of Madame de... shifts toward regret when we see that its sweeping camera motions are imprisoning its characters in dances through time. The vulgarity of our love of spectacle and self-revelation turns Lola Montes into a terrible humiliation of its heroine.

La Ronde is hardly so dark. In large part it simply invites its audience to watch a divertissement. But Anton Walbrook's introduction mentions our "curiosity...people want to see all sides of life." This "curiosity" makes us follow the affairs of Ophuls' characters and sets up the final reversal when the plot comes full circle. Emotions that began the film trivial and simple, and became deeper and more important to the characters, are lost in the proliferation of incidents and characters. Our detachment imperceptibly increases as his characters grow older and more sophisticated, as their relations become games between people who know how to manage each other. We lose the little intensity Ophuls allowed us: emotions and characters who seemed light before become sympathetic innocents in retrospect.

OPHULS takes us out of La Roude with a feeling for the characters whose precision excludes sentimental excess. He describes them in their gestures, their social situations, their physical settings, by the clarity of his dramatic and visual style. But it is impossible to avoid feeling regret for them. The control Ophuls maintains over this feeling makes La Ronde a perfect work. Never does he impose an attitude or an emotion upon his audience. His style rather becomes a persuasive totality which reveals itself to us as art while showing us particular loves.

MIKE PROKOSCH