Erotikon

Huge, dead tree beetles, a long-haired Arabian beauty dancing an erotic, half-naked dance of the veils wearing an exotic peacock-feathered headdress, and a niece who secretly likes to kick up her legs and smoke, makes mutton and cabbage casserole, and flirts with her own uncle - just a few of the things featured in this somewhat weird, but interesting, and even, at times, mildly amusing silent film. The film is about Leo, a professor of entomology and his tired-looking, bored "touched with melancholy" wife Irene, who has a crush on her husband's best friend, a handsome sculptor named Preben (Lars Hanson). Preben is in love with Irene as well, but holds back because of his friendship with her husband. Meanwhile, Leo flirts with, of all things, his own niece (and she must be a blood relative as she has the same last name as him!). Jealousies ensue.

I thought the film was pretty well done and enjoyable, though a bit slow in parts. The music score that accompanies this film didn't really suit the story very well and was pretty heavy and gloomy for most of the film - in fact, it was really getting on my nerves (not in a good way) for the last half hour or so. The music did suit the story in a few places though - namely, a scene where they attend the opera to see this fantasy ballet featuring the on-stage tale of a Shah and his beautiful "favorite wife", and my favorite scene in the film - an interesting bit of photography in which Irene takes a flight with another of her flirtations, Baron Felix, and we watch their little plane as it sours through the air, Irene's scarf flying in the open air cockpit, and camera strapped to the wings as it looks through the moving clouds to the landscape below. Well done. The print of this looked very good, tinted in most scenes a sort of bright yellow-brown shade.

I have to admit at times I was thinking ... is this really a century old? It did feel like someone made a movie and made it look like it was ... "old". Especially considering some of the themes depicted here - you wouldn't think that a movie of that time would have women in such big roles. Movies after this had less female centric things going for them.

All that aside, this is a silent movie. Which while I have seen quite a few - it had been a while. So yes there is music, but all the dialog (well the dialog that is deemed necessary to be truthful) is being displayed on cards between scenes. Since it isn't an english movie the cards had subtitles ... I reckon I could have seen a version where they already had english cards ... but the streaming service that had the movie on did use the original cards. Just putting that information out there for those interested.

A strange movie in many respects. But an intriguing and intersting one, if you are able to take into account when this was shot ... and the context of that time and how much more it must have meant back then.

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.

Beside Victor Sjostrom, the well known director of THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE, the man who contributed his wonderfully individual style into the silent productions of Svensk Filmindustrie and, consequently, into the world cinema was Mauritz Stiller. What a great name for many movie historians! The man who took all pains to make his productions special, the director who creatively brought to screen Selma Lagerlof's immortal novels, the tutor famous for discovering Greta Gustafsson (Greta Garbo)...one could endlessly continue with the significant facts. Yet, that is not the case. What seems to be important here is Stiller's innovation and his mesmerizing ability to surprise viewers. Such a surprise is his EROTIKON, a 1920 silent film which would surely meet the standards of a comedy, a vivid action film, a romantic picture with subtle images and a glorious boast of fine acting.

The content of EROTIKON is seemingly simple and refers mostly to the relations, or better said 'inter-relations' among people. Yet, we have to realize that the film is being seen nowadays from the entirely different perspective with the entirely new vision of certain aspects. Naturally, even the things we expect in a comedy changed. Any silent film is, of course, being seen differently. When we consider the content regarding this very knowledge, EROTIKON occurs to be revolutionary, much ahead of its time. Stiller proves to be extremely open to modern thinking and, as a result, he becomes a milestone in the later trends in cinema. Certain notions on marriage, on the place of women in society, on the superiority of feelings to old, dusted regulations are particularly modern and appealing to an average movie buff nowadays. Here, the open minded thinking is so fresh, so unique, so absorbing though the film is, paradoxically, almost a century old. Why? Because EROTIKON is no preacher of what the things should be like but places the characters in the superior positions.

Since the characters make for the story, it is thanks to them that we enjoy the film. A few people are in the lead and...their emotions, desires, dreams seem to achieve their intensity and climax at the end. This is Professor Leo (Anders De Wahl). Most professors are famous for their researches and it depends, of course, what they research on...Leo's researches are quite peculiar...their subject are the beetles. He is a book buff, a calm man who loves very concrete schedule and takes life rather optimistically. Being naive in erotic tensions here and there, he skips certain desires around. Yet, he detests one thing: dramatic endings. His wife, Irene (Tora Teje) is a character worth consideration. She is a sort of prototype of a modern woman, independent of her husband, a woman who has a clear idea of what to do with life once giving a furrier a lesson of patience, another time traveling with a 'new Ikar' by helicopter, Baron Felix. Played by Tora Teje, she is given some marvelous moments of humor. Consider her waving at the husband or flirting scenes. Then comes a young, youthful, pretty, enthusiastic Marte (Karin Molander), a sweetie who loves sweets, a character who represents a light-hearted glimpse of a young girl: listening curiously to Professor's lecture on beetles' sexual life at the door, smoking a cigarette when the guests have left, making certain sensual moves meant to arouse men. She surprises us most at the end... Finally comes Preben (Lars Hanson), the best friend of the professor who has a crush on Irene...he appears to be fluent, more aware of life, sophisticated and burning within, burning with desire. Wonderfully portrayed by Lars Hanson, the actor who later became famous in Hollywood, the character of Prebel is very clear and memorable.

Those four characters supply us with wonderful tension that you will never forget. Their plots are so strongly linked to the strange fate of Shah and his wife in the Schaname that the opera sequence makes a perfect sense in the movie.

When seeing EROTIKON one may notice many other innovations, artistic features that played such a decisive role in Stiller's productions. For the director who had an unbelievable flair for beauty, the film could not come out with the lack of elegant wardrobe, wonderful sets, stunning visuals, catchy close-ups, fluent camera work and the technologically modern (for the time) stimuli like phones in a car and a helicopter. It all adds a certain amount of artistic pleasure and makes EROTIKON a valuable, enjoyable movie.

There is, moreover, one more aspect I would like to add when considering the artistic aspect. It is the great job done by Alva Lindbohm Lundin and the whole aesthetics and creativity in the subtitles. The pictures, created by her in the Svensk Filmindustrie, include birds chirping as the symbol of flirting or a question mark between the hearts symbolizing the dilemma who loves whom. These are just a few among the whole chain of wonderful ideas.

Some people will perhaps say that there are many elements of American cinema...true to a certain extent...like modern music often models upon immortal classical pieces, the same has occurred to happen in cinema...EROTIKON is a highly recommended film as an authentic presentation of certain aspects, as a tribute to feelings that should reign our acts, as the beautiful song "Jeg Elsker Dig" (I love you) that mysteriously showed the characters the paths they should take. A brilliant silent film!

A scientist falls in love with a young girl who brings life and joy into his old house and marriage, while his wife is having an affair with his best friend. This is a completely delightful romantic comedy - one of the first ones ever? - with an abundance of wit and good acting. Mauritz Stiller is sometimes considered less interesting than his contemporary Swedish director Victor Sjöström, but Stiller had a feel for style and comedy which makes his films in my eyes fresher and more enjoyable than Sjöström's films. Stiller's more somber films have not aged as well as his comedies. Erotikon is perhaps a ditty, but it is certainly a wonderful one. If possible, see it in a cinema with a piano player playing live music - the film truly benefits from it.