Frigo et la baleine

Ever since the sixties, Buster Keaton has been championed by intellectuals, who like to place him with such 20th century masters as Kafka and Beckett. In claiming Keaton for high art, critics often exaggerate the strains of cynicism, pessimism, and irony in his work, while overlooking the sincere drama and laugh-out-loud comedy in the films, as well as the soulfulness and unflagging determination of Buster's characters. But if surrealism and black humor are what you want, The Love Nest is thoroughly dominated by both. It's not one of Keaton's most successful films, nor one of his funniest, yet I find it oddly compelling. If you want to see Buster at his nautical best, watch The Boat or The Navigator; but this is an interesting twist on the seafaring theme.

The last two-reel comedy Keaton made before embarking on full-length features, The Love Nest has several distinctions. It's the only one of his films for which Buster took sole writing and directing credit. And it's the only one that has no leading lady: a photo of Virginia Fox provides the only feminine presence. Having lost her, Buster sets out on a solitary ocean voyage in a tiny homemade boat (ironically called Cupid.) Days later, we see him adrift, weak, thirsty, and starving—and wearing a painted-on beard. He's rescued by a whaling ship (even more ironically called the Love Nest), which turns out to be captained by a sadistic tyrant (Big Joe Roberts), who punishes minor infractions by heaving sailors overboard and tossing memorial wreathes after them. The whaling ship is beautifully realized, with a grim, Melvillean raffishness; this section is remarkably similar to the later film The Sea Wolf in both look and theme. There are some wonderful moments. Buster gazes longingly at the view through a porthole, and then the captain comes up and takes the porthole away. Buster walks into the water with a gun over his shoulder and emerges with a fish he has shot. When he wants to escape in a lifeboat that's too heavy for him to launch alone, he goes below and smashes a hole in the whaling ship's hull, then sits in the lifeboat waiting for the larger boat to sink, calmly playing solitaire.

The beginning and end of the film are particularly weak, as though Buster wasn't sure how to justify the whaling ship sequence. (The very end appears to be missing, however, so who knows what the closing gag might have been.) I think at this point, Buster was eager to move on to feature films and weary of coming up with ideas for short films every other month. Many of his late two-reelers have odd structures, far-out premises, and a slightly tired, sour feeling. But The Love Nest is a strangely beautiful, dreamlike little film, and I like it because it's impossible to imagine anyone except Buster Keaton making it.

If only a handful of excerpted highlights had survived from "The Love Nest" (a title which, incidentally, bears the most tangential reference to the action of the film, being an ironic comment on the hostile environment in which Buster ends up), we should probably be mourning it as a lost masterpiece. And indeed, in common with even the most unsatisfactory of Buster Keaton's shorts, it contains moments of pure originality: the man had an inspired talent.

However, on seeing it as a whole, I found it somewhat disjointed. The best of Keaton's work builds from one gag to its culmination in the next as a seamless whole, while this one comes across more as a series of assorted sketches, some of which sound good in isolation (the fish-shooting scene), some of which are in themselves a little lame ("All hands on deck"?), but only some of which really integrate into the central, darkly entertaining, storyline of the ship and her homicidal captain. And I have to confess to being disconcerted by some very poor quality special effects and the use of battered stock footage, in contrast to Keaton's usual emphasis on non-fakery: perhaps this was a deliberate statement of some kind on the nature of reality and non-reality, but if so it passed me by. While a number of Keaton's films, e.g. "The Frozen North" or "Sherlock Jr", rely on the dream-sequence theme, here it really came across to me as over-used: either the film is trying to be too clever for its own good, or else it strikes you as simply cheating...

Views on "The Love Nest" seem to be polarised between 'sardonic pinnacle of achievement' and 'not one of Buster's best'; those of us in the second category are evidently overlooking something! But -- while there are certainly sequences I should hate to see lost -- it's one of my least favourite silent shorts.

This short comedy is less polished than Keaton's best features, but it has some very funny moments, with a good finale that is clever and also suggestive. Keaton and the supporting cast pull of most of the gag ideas quite well. The setting might offer more limited possibilities than do many of Keaton's other short features, but they seem to have gotten the most out of the material.

The story opens with Buster, depressed because of romantic difficulties, setting off in a tiny boat to get away from it all, leading to many unexpected developments. Joe Roberts is well-cast as Buster's antagonist, and there are some amusing confrontations between the two. Virginia Fox also helps out.

Buster pulls off some good morbid gags, with his deadpan style serving well in making them work. There are also a number of nice subtle humorous touches. Most Keaton fans should enjoy this one.

Now here's a Keaton short I can confidently recommend.

In contrast to "The Boat", Buster is not at the mercy of physics here. This time he causes the chaos, and he's aware of it. He spends the duration wriggling his way out of trouble, instead of more deeply into it.

The absurd tone of the whole thing is set by the goofs in what is a sort of anti-"Dear John" letter ("PS If you do not receive this letter, write me").

But what makes this special is the revelation that this is one big slapstick dream. And...all of that is wrapped within another envelope of absurdity, exposed to us in brilliant visual shorthand -- add them up and you have something quite uniquely cinematic.

Remarkable, typically inventive Keaton short, laced with a horrifying comic disregard of death and an emasculating admission of inadequacy. Buster is a heartbroken swain who decides to cure his loss by forswearing women and manfully taking to the sea. Here he meets a mad brute of a captain who throws overboard any of his crew that displeases him. Buster's entirely spurious skill endears him to the captain.

Besides being a wonderful parody of macho Ahab-like naval nonsense, this is another Keaton fantasy as metaphysical nightmare. Buster is cast adrift on a metaphorical sea, boarding the ship of death, with the Grim Reaper as his master. Prowess, ingenuity and sheer accidental good fortune keep him afloat until a climactic, heavily resonant, chase through a labyrinthine ship.

I don't mean to weigh the film down with pseudo-meaningfulness, but the humour of Keaton's films has an eerie, lingering, resonant effect on the soul, similar to the Alice books. Supposedly comic froth, visual metaphors from his films haunt the mind for years after as unerringly accurate encapsulations of the human condition. No wonder Beckett adored him, although I know whose comfort I'd rather have.

And the film is very, very funny, ridiculous, clever, awe-inspiring. The gorgeous clarity of the film's imagery, and the eerie composition of space combine to create a convincing landscape of the mind. Keaton's physical grace may seem less showy than Chaplin's, but its very suppleness in modesty astonishes, as does his graceful negotiation of obstacles and forbidding spaces. Indeed, it is Buster's very freedom of movement that is finally redemptive - although he is a mere automaton going through his creator's paces, his inevitable imperturbility and melancholy dignity achieves an aesthetic, transcendence of beauty and grace. The typical Keaton revelation that the movie is a dream is not bathetic - our dreams of adventure are never a joke; but more importantly, the anxieties and desires of these dreams are both recognisable and deeply , painfully disturbing.