The Novel of Werther

The young lawyer Werther is posted to a small town and meets Charlotte. She is engaged to another man, Albert. Werther knows it and does not give up, and the story makes no attempt to escape its known ending. The subject is not love but love becoming a personality. The moment Werther puts his feeling at the centre of his life, everything else, his work, his friends, his future, drops to second place, and the film neither exalts him nor treats him as a fool. The form carries Max Ophüls' familiar fluency: the camera moves through rooms, motion continues across the ball and the country scenes, and there are few cuts. A camera this mobile was not standard in French productions of the period. The source is Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. Ophüls had been forced out of Germany and was working in France, so he filmed a classic of German literature in exile, in French. Given the year and the direction Europe was taking, that choice is a note in itself. Pierre Richard-Willm plays Werther, Annie Vernay Charlotte and Jean Galland Albert. Who it is for: viewers who like classical literary adaptation and Ophüls' way with a camera. Who it is not for: anyone looking for the equivalent of the novel's interior voice; cinema cannot quite carry that first-person intensity.