Twirling at the heart of most Max Ophüls movies is a dance at some stage of rapture. In “Letter from an Unknown Woman” (1948), an infatuated young woman and her tall, dark megacrush sway till dawn; in “Caught” (1949), it’s an idealistic doctor falling for his new receptionist on their first night out. And in Ophüls’s 1952 Guy de Maupassant adaptation, “Le Plaisir,” a masked married man furiously chases the fire of his youth by leading kick lines at a club.

But the most fleet-footed transport comes in Ophüls’s 1953 tragedy of obsession, “The Earrings of Madame de…,” which begins a two-week run today at Film Forum. In the hypnotic sequence, an Italian diplomat and a French general’s wife glide through time and space across different ballroom floors over several nights. The couple’s graceful movements are the gravitational core of the film, an ethereal embrace that they try to make last forever precisely because it can’t.

Ophüls (1902–57) crafted many tales of impossible union and unrequited longing during a distinguished but bumpy career. He began shooting features in his native Germany in the 1930s before fleeing to France as Hitler was on the rise, and in 1941 he joined the talented ranks of fellow émigrés in Hollywood. It was an uneasy fit, and the idiosyncratic auteur languished for years before making a few absorbing, hard-to-classify films. While on assignment in Europe, he stayed put and tore through several new works until a heart attack after the megaproduction “Lola Montes” did him in.

A product of Ophüls’s European homecoming, and widely regarded as his masterpiece, 1953’s “The Earrings of Madame de…” expresses the ardors of love within a fluid framework of exquisite technique. Ophüls sends his attentive, ceaselessly mobile cameras through twinkling Belle Époque decor and multilevel sets, directing suavely contained performances from his actors. “What he sought was so fragile and yet so precise,” Francois Truffaut once wrote, “that it had to be sheltered in a disproportionately huge wrapping, like a precious jewel enclosed in 15 cases.”

“Earrings,” of course, features an actual jewel, a diamond-studded pair that, like the romantic obsession of the film, refuses to be forgotten. Once upon a time the earrings were a wedding gift to the titular Madame (Danielle Darrieux) from her sophisticated husband (Charles Boyer). When we meet her — her name is withheld in the manner of 19th-century novels — the countess has debts to pay that feel more urgent than the artifice of marriage. The original jeweler obliges her after she executes a faint of the finest aristocratic pedigree.

The sale of the earrings sets off a series of foreseeable complications and petits mensonges: at the opera Madame pretends to have lost them, to the consternation of her husband and the chagrin of the vain jeweler, who complains. But when a fateful trip abroad involves her with the quietly charming diplomat Donati (Vittorio De Sica, director of “Bicycle Thief” and frequent actor), the jewels become something more. With each appearance, they are a stubbornly circulating trace of the characters’ loves, memories, stewing loyalties, and mortality.

The early frivolity fostered by Madame’s apparent flightiness and the general’s masterful wit dissipates breathtakingly as the movie’s rhythms shift with the sweet sorrows of her affair. A coy early bedroom scene in which the general smugly indulges his wife’s lies has a devastating counterpart later when, over her sickbed, he resolves on a harsh but deeply felt course of damage control. The general’s bon mot — that the longtime couple’s love is “only superficially superficial” — rings true, even though Madame has clearly lost the ability to escape her consuming infatuation.

Along with Donati, the general and his wife are also wealthy and influential figures in a story set vaguely in the uneasy fin-de-siècle era running up to World War I. There’s more than a dash of critical irony to Ophüls’s pitting a diplomat against a general (though it’s tame compared to the fuss, and the satire, unleashed in 1952’s “Le Plaisir” when a town brothel closes for one night).

But Ophüls, as always, reserves a special devotion to the societal plight of his woman character. In the saga, Madame is uniquely stained and defined by her possessions and her obsession. Indeed, “Earrings” was the third collaboration between Ophüls and his tireless lead, Ms. Darrieux (who, incidentally, will celebrate her 90th birthday in a few weeks).

The nuanced, spiritual portraiture of the film’s final, sweeping scene in a church ranks with the most beautifully executed camera movements in cinema. Ophüls’s fans and acolytes would stretch from Stanley Kubrick, who lifted his famous tracking shots, down to such modern filmmakers as Todd Haynes (“Far From Heaven”) and Wong Kar Wai, who refracts Ophülsian longing into infinite textures. A deeply refined stylist who achieved an unparalleled brand of romantic realism, Ophüls was the rare filmmaker who rewarded both obsessive study and rapturous obsession.

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