Erotikon on DVD (review)
mikeg...@gmail.com
wife, a cosmopolitan lady of leisure, takes up with a flashy aviator,
mainly, it seems, to torment a sculptor who loves her; turn up the
heat, stir, and wait for the boil...
The DVD release's jacket does a mild disservice to Mauritz Stiller's
Erotikon (1920) by stating that its slyly sardonic approach to sexual
intrigue inspired Ernst Lubitsch. As the only Lubitsch film I've seen
that predates Erotikon is the preposterous and galumphing Eyes of the
Mummy, I'm prepared to accept that Lubitsch had a significant epiphany
that helped him become the sort of filmmaker who could make The
Marriage Circle. But the expectation is thus set that Erotikon will
have an effervescent comic pace and a constantly winking eye like a
Lubitsch film of the 30s-- and that is not the case.
A better touchstone for the film is The Rules of the Game (not least
because an aviator plays so prominent a role), a movie which observes,
with the sad empathy of a veteran priest with many Saturdays spent
listening to confession behind him, the desperate efforts of a group of
humans to chase after happiness-- only to make things worse in most
cases. Erotikon begins with a fussy middle-aged professor lecturing on
bigamous beetles (oddly anticipating the recent movie biography of Dr.
Kinsey), and takes a consciously scientific detachment toward its
characters as they scurry about, trying to keep mortality at bay by
finding some form of erotic excitement in lives which are a bit too
settled, under-occupied and, it appears, sexually frustrated. A
comedy, yes, and even one that wraps up in high spirits, and yet a
comedy that's touched throughout by melancholy, and played with a sort
of gravity and a deliberate pace that gives us time to feel the hurt
under the surface.
Or so it seemed to me when I watched it tonight. Then I watched the
"intro" by the film scholar Peter Cowie, and learned that Erotikon is
quite the opposite. Unlike Smiles of a Summer Night, another obvious
comparison, Erotikon's comedy does not have a moralistic melancholy
undertone, says Cowie. What struck me as gravity, like Preston Sturges
slowed down to Douglas Sirk if not Carl Dreyer, strikes Cowie as
"frothy."
How to account for the fact that Cowie sees a completely different
Erotikon than I do? Well, for one thing, I suppose he has far more
experience of Scandinavian cinema on which to build his preconceptions;
next to a diet of Sjostrom, Bergman, Strindberg and Hamsun, Erotikon IS
frothy, I'm sure. And I doubt he had seen it, the first few times at
least, with the particular score on this DVD, a Celtic dirge that seems
to belong to a production of "The Death of Cuchulain" more than it does
to a 1920s drawing room comedy; it certainly puts the film in a dourer
key than a conventional romantic comedy score would have. Maybe I'll
try watching it again with something peppier, and see if it's a
different movie.
Adding to the uncertainty of tone is the fact that the film contains a
wide variety of acting styles. Tora Teje (as the socialite wife) and
Lars Hanson (as the sculptor) are highly effective in a theatrical,
heightened-naturalism sort of way, while Anders de Wahl as the husband
and especially Torsten Hammaren as an aged professor who seems to be
the Swedish answer to Mr. Muckle in It's a Gift are caricatures of
woolly-headed academia. It's a bit like Deborah Kerr in Bonjour
Tristesse being married to Fred MacMurray in The Absent-Minded
Professor.
Despite this mismatch-- perhaps to be expected in such a trailblazing
comedy with no apparent models to follow, other than its stage
original-- Erotikon is a striking and interesting film, one of the few
silents that seems to leap out of the period, untouched by the
customary moralizing Victorian preconceptions of what is proper
behavior for its characters (and proper punishment for those who
violate it). Erotikon simply observes what these creatures do
naturally; applying morals to them would be self-delusion, and Erotikon
is a movie largely free of illusions.
Lloyd Fonvielle
problematic aspect -- tone.
Discovering a remarkable film like this AFTER one has come to know the
masterpieces that in some sense derive from it (by one route or another)
-- "The Marriage Circle", "The Rules Of the Game" -- is a little
disorienting . . . sort of like discovering that the Bible has a lot of
quotes from Shakespeare in it.
As you say, the film is perhaps most remarkable for its lack of moral
judgment about the behavior of its subjects -- there are no Victorian
pieties framing its voyeuristic presentation of bourgeois peccadilloes.
But neither is there any modern celebration of "freedom" from those
pieties. Indeed, the film seems a little bewildered by itself, and the
sense of release in the "happy ending" strikes a false note. I'm not
sure I can read the ambiguity as melancholy, as you do, but I know I
can't read it as frothy.
In "The Marriage Circle", a much more subtle and complex film, it's
suggested that marriages, even good marriages, are based on lies of one
sort or another -- but that these lies can be worth telling. And
balanced against this insight is a sympathy for the sadness of those who
are totally cynical about the whole game, who don't have anything to
hold on to that's worth lying about.
In "The Rules Of the Game", the lies in the end serve only to maintain
decorum in a rotting world -- all sweetness is doomed. But Lubitsch and
Renoir both have a keen appreciation of sweetness, of the profound
pleasures of flirtation and yearning and romance, however precarious or
doomed.
The men in Madame Charpentier's life in "Erotikon", however, are both so
doltish, so unfitted for the play of hearts, that you can't feel good
about her ending up with either of them. She herself is so playful, so
hungry for play, that she'll even engineer an ironic tragedy to try and
recruit some playfellows. Her psychic isolation is so potent, and so
potentially lethal, that I really couldn't buy the idea that Wells was
going to dispel it. I was left with a nagging suspicion that she and
Wells would end up after a few years in the same sort of marriage she
just escaped from.
That's a melancholy thought, all right -- I'm just not convinced that
it's what Stiller intended to convey. And if he did, the film, with its
conspicuous lack of lyrical celebration, of romantic lilt, becomes
something more than melancholy. It becomes utterly dark, cynical, even
nihilistic -- caught in an attitude that even Lubitsch and Renoir, in
their most disenchanted moods, would find pitiable.
mikeg...@gmail.com wrote:
=================
Nowhere Confidential:
mikeg...@gmail.com
doing is so unsympathetic (deliberately tormenting her furrier for
sport-- she actually has it listed in her calendar that way!) that it
takes a long time to get a handle on why she's driven to such
distractions and not simply an awful person. You can imagine the same
scene being played for screwball with someone like Alice Brady playing
the part, and being amusing there, but it's serious here. Yet as you
sort of say, she's by far the most interesting character, so if you're
not getting what she's about, it's hard to know what the movie's trying
to be about.
I wonder, too, if this is a movie that plays more like a comedy on the
big screen. I think there's a lot of small gestural stuff that
contributes to the comedic tone, where if you're seeing it at a
distance and mainly getting the plot, it seems much more serious, even
potentially leading toward tragedy. I may watch it again sitting much
closer to my TV and with a different score playing, and see if I feel
like it's a different movie.
Lloyd Fonvielle
> Yes, and one of the problems is that one of the first things we see her
> doing is so unsympathetic (deliberately tormenting her furrier for
> sport-- she actually has it listed in her calendar that way!) that it
> takes a long time to get a handle on why she's driven to such
> distractions and not simply an awful person. You can imagine the same
> scene being played for screwball with someone like Alice Brady playing
> the part, and being amusing there, but it's serious here. Yet as you
> sort of say, she's by far the most interesting character, so if you're
> not getting what she's about, it's hard to know what the movie's trying
> to be about.
She's definitely the core of it -- she's got everybody's number, knows
they're all stuck in their conventional roles, but she still keeps
trying to engage them in play . . . she waves and waves so sweetly, but
no one ever waves back.
> I wonder, too, if this is a movie that plays more like a comedy on the
> big screen. I think there's a lot of small gestural stuff that
> contributes to the comedic tone, where if you're seeing it at a
> distance and mainly getting the plot, it seems much more serious, even
> potentially leading toward tragedy. I may watch it again sitting much
> closer to my TV and with a different score playing, and see if I feel
> like it's a different movie.
It's an incredibly complex film -- exciting because at every moment you
feel it could veer in any direction. I honestly think that Stiller
didn't know how to end it, didn't know what to do with this powerful
female presence at its center. Cowie's commentary strikes me as totally
clueless -- he praises the performnace of the niece, which is just fine,
but misses the mystery of Mrs. Charpentier's angst, and the subtlety
of her enactment of it. Her performance may not be aesthetically
coherent but its general effect is sublime.