The 100 Super Movies au maximum: The Reckless Moment

"Cyberspace is no place for mommies." -- Karen Joy Fowler

Maybe not, but The Reckless Moment proves that there's sure a place for 'em in film noir. In fact, as with a lot of formulas favored by self-pitying spoiled sons, film noir makes more sense with a mommy in the lead.

Sit-coms and comic strips love the American family because something big always seems to be happening but everything is back to normal by the end of the episode. The Reckless Moment repositions that once-a-day cycle from the mother's point of view: the family member's job is to present every passing fancy as an emergency to the mother, but the mother's job is to maintain stability at any cost. Where Douglas Sirk's domestic tragedies emphasize suffocation (the enveloping family keeps you warm at the cost of snuffing out flames), Ophuls pecks to death.

The eventual effect of this affection-hungry din is to level all stimuli out. Thus Ophuls's thoroughgoing use of a narrative technique I've never seen used anywhere else in film, fiction, or theater: the deliberate tossing away of obvious opportunities for suspense and emotional climaxes. Drama is replaced by fretfulness:

• The mother takes a motorboat on a dangerous mission. After she's safely home, we're told at some length that the boat has mechanical problems and that she could have been stranded. Why are we told afterwards? Is it important? Probably not, but it nestles in with the other nagging pointless worries
• A romantic stranger signals his affection by smuggling a gift into the mother's shopping bag; she finds it and assumes the shopkeeper made a mistake and that she'll have to return it later. She doesn't. Has she forgotten? Has understanding dawned offscreen? What will happen the next time her child asks about it? We never find out, because more recent (and therefore more urgent) crises intervene.
• A small town, full of gossips in that Hollywood small town way, sees her gallivanting around all day with the romantic stranger. Does that put her marriage in danger? Who knows? We're on edge, but the only on-screen event that might have been provoked by gossip is her father-in-law's distractingly and uselessly tardy offer of emotional support.

And so on, until it's completely understandable that someone who needs $5000 overnight would start trying to figure out how to trim the electric bill, and that someone might panic as much over the distinction between "getting" a loan and "making" a loan as about murder, blackmail, and truly doomed love.

(Those intrigued by Ophuls's gynocentric approach to film noir should also seek out Caught, which must be the only Hollywood movie in which a miscarriage supplies the happy ending. And then probably move on to Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles....)