The Fan

Otto Preminger - 1949
Based on the Wilde play; with some unnecessary bits, and the horrific wild ending, but those same themes, filmed like so, the stolid bourgeois, so inexpressive, the tracks into them... There are some, and I'm really thinking of one in particular, two shots of (female, usually) faces where domination changes, mother and daughter, one comes to be another. Here we have 'Persona'.
There are also the movements into the past. These kind of flashbacks have of course long been a staple, but I can't remember an earlier example of going back sixty years in the course of a pan across a room... I thought that wasn't meant to happen for another decade.
We here have memory, creating memory. We have creating a person, creating an attitude. Picking together pieces. We have the twist half way through. And the atmosphere of desire, making all ambiguous. They are able to reflect on their desire, look at it from outside, which seems to add to it (not being identified with one's desire). It isn't funny, there is rather an air of sadness is the gilded smoothly walk around in their dying society.