Erotikon on DVD (review)

A professor has a bit of an infatuation with his niece; the professor's
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.

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.

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.