His only color and widescreen film, Ophuls’ swan song to the cinema is an epic biopic about the famous nineteenth century courtesan of the title, mistress to both Franz Liszt and Leopold I of Bavaria. The film is set in a circus, with Lola herself the star attraction, appearing in a series of gaudy tableaux based on the most notorious episodes of her life, which in turn give way to stunning flashbacks. The complex narrative structure marks the culmination of Ophuls’ fascination with the role that time plays – as history, as fate, as coincidence – in human affairs. Throughout his career Ophuls was fond of using an onscreen narrator (most notably in The Comedy of Money and La ronde); here that function is filled by the cynical, sinister ringmaster played by Peter Ustinov, who is at once a Brechtian device and the avatar of spectacle-as-exploitation.