Love Nest

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.

Buster Keaton decides to finish with the woman who breaks off their engagement and sail off to sea, but he ends up as a crew member of a ship run by a cruel captain who has a habit of throwing those who displease him overboard. Keaton's last short is a disappointingly average effort, suggesting perhaps that his mind was already on bigger things.

It is the detail making difference by the other short films of Buster Keaton. A sad love story. A trip for cure the soul. A meet and a tyranic captain. A boat and military exercises. And the inspired end. The dream shadow is the perfect skin for what are more than adventures but interesting reflection about choices and heroism. And about adventures as root of perspective about life.

The great Buster Keaton's short films may have been inconsistent in quality, though certainly through no fault of his. There are some wonderful ones, such as 'The Scarecrow' and 'The Goat'. A few though disappointed, such as 'The Frozen North' and 'The Balloonatic', yet were still watchable (it takes a lot for me to consider any of Keaton's work unwatchable). What they have in common as the main reason to see them is Keaton himself, wholly deserving of his comedy genius reputation.

Keaton did though do a lot better than 'The Love Nest', not just short films but also his overall filmography. It is definitely worth seeing, has great things and Keaton himself doesn't disappoint, but for me the material, amusing but not his most inspired, and storytelling were flawed. If to rank his short films from best to worst, for me 'The Love Nest' is towards the bottom. Just to reiterate, it is far from terrible, actually did like it, just didn't love it.

A lot of good things can be seen here in 'The Love Nest'. Other Keaton short films may be more polished visually, with more refined editing, but the more surrealistic imagery is quite eerie and there is a lot of atmosphere in the stark photography. There is plenty of charm here, without being sappy, and enough amuses. Joe Roberts is a formidable nemesis.

What makes 'The Love Nest' worth seeing are two things. One is Keaton, who has great comic timing as ever, is daringly athletic and nobody before, during or since did deadpan more expressvely than him. When it comes to standout scenes, the highlight is the pretty ingenious, very funny and thrillingly staged climax.

So it was something of a shame that other aspects of 'The Love Nest' weren't as inspired. The story here is pretty weak, it takes a while to gain momentum, with the first third feeling over-stretched, and much of it feels rather thin and incomplete. It did feel like more was filmed but left out for time constraints, which would account for why structurally it felt slightly choppy at times.

Despite enough of 'The Love Nest' being amusing, not much is hilarious or particularly inventive. While the climax is brilliant, the very end is less so and felt almost like an abrupt easy way out. May be a little biased as it is a type of ending that has always come off as too much of a cheat and indicative of not knowing how to end it.

Overall, above average and worthwhile but generally not exceptional. 6/10

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.