La valse dans l'ombre

LeRoy made a film which flings prostitution in our faces, and in the faces of its characters - yet he doesn't dare mention the word or show the deed explicitly. I'm not complaining; the fact that no one dares utter the p-word helps the film immeasurably. The tragedy plays out best in an atmosphere in which Myra's moral stain, or purported moral stain, is LITERALLY an unspeakable one. No modern director (with the possible exception of David Mamet) would dare NOT be explicit.

Unfortunately for a love story, the love scenes are the only interactions lacking in electricity, the only interactions, in fact, that aren't interactions at all. They're the dull bits we endure in order to enjoy the real story. I should stress that they're still pleasant enough, so it's not MUCH of an endurance test.

And what IS the real story? The delightful thing about it, I think, is that it's perfectly ambiguous. Taken one way, the romance between hero and heroine is destroyed because of the power of a pervasive, yet false, moral belief: the belief that a prostitute is tainted, unfit for marriage, love, life itself. Taken this way the story is a social tragedy. But arguably the film is asking us to make believe that the pervasive moral belief is in fact true, that the heroine really is (through no fault of her own) tainted; taken THIS way, it's a kind of moral fantasy. Either way it works.