Trois pages d'un journal

When I startes watching "Diary of a lost girl" my expectation was that this was a twin film of "Pandora's box" (1929, Georg Wilhelm Pabst). Both films were a Pabst / Louise Brooks collaboration and in both films (I thought) the Louise Brooks character (Lulu in "Pandora's box" and Thymian in "Diary of a lost girl") symbolized the decadence of the roaring twenties.

I was surprised that after all Thymian is entirely different from Lulu. Lulu is a call girl (who ends badly), and Thymian is in the first place a victim of a society in which it is "normal" that men satisfy their sexual needs and women pay the price. Because Thymian differs from Lulu, "Diary of a lost girl" differs from "Pandora's box". In effect "Diary of a lost girl" is more akin to "The joyless street" (1925, Georg Wilhelm Pabst).

One of the lead actress of "The joyless street" was Greta Garbo. For her the Pabst film was the start of her career. For Louise Brooks it was the end. She was too independent for the Hollywood dream factory. In retrospect however the two films she made with Pabst gave her immortality (some decades later).

Apart from the Thymian character I was amazed by the rather obvious lesbian character of the matron of the reformatory Thymian is sent to (when she has "to pay the price"). The film was however made outside Hollywood in the first place and before the production code in the second. The actress playing this role (Valeska Gert) is moreover another link to "The joyless street". In this film she plays Frau Greifer, who runs a nightclub annex brothel.

Who would have guessed that these two collaborated in a film superior to Pandora's Box. Pabst and Brooks were a rare combination indeed, and must serve as another decisive exception to the auteur theory. Having just viewed both, I think a case can be made that the Lost Girl film is actually superior to the admittedly better known film. How Krackhaeur could have ignored the value of these two films in his "Caligari to Hitler" book is indeed baffling. The scenes in the "foster" home are fascinating and may indeed say something about the authoritarian mindset of 20s Germany. (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is another good example)

I saw Pandora's Box several years ago. At the time, Diary of a Lost Girl was unavailable for viewing. I discovered it had been re- released on DVD, completely restored. It is far superior to Pandora's Box, in my opinion. Louise Brooks plays Thyamin, a young innocent who is raped by her lothario father's chemist assistant. Her pregnancy results in her banishment from the house, and she is placed in a reform school. Her escape from the institution leads her to a brothel, where she spends her life until her father's death...when her life changes. Unlike Pandora's Box, which is about an unredeemable nymphomaniac, Diary of A Lost Girl is a story about loss, redemption, forgiveness, sacrifice, and hope. It has a much richer plotline, sublime cinematography, and Louise Brooks shone like a star. This film itself is a rediscovered treasure. Highly, highly recommended.

Louise Brooks is Thymian, a girl with an unfortunate tendency to swoon in the arms of unscrupulous men. She has an unwanted baby and, abandoned by her father and cruel mother-in-law is sent to a harsh reformatory from which she escapes only to wake up one morning and discover she is a prostitute. Brooks is charming and effective as Thymian, a delicate, kind-hearted girl whose innocence is only cruelly taken advantage of - she certainly has no trouble getting us on her side and it's partly to do with the sense of childish happiness you feel is ready to burst out of her despite the adversity. She looks even cuter with her hair slicked back in the workhouse. Not as powerful and bleakly tragic as Pandora's Box, made the same year - but, with plenty of humour and some outrageous characterisations, is probably more entertaining.

It isn't difficult to see why Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl caused a bit of a headache for the censors back in 1929. Even for a movie made during the Weimar Republic era, a revolutionary time for cinema when directors were consistently pushing the boundaries with controversial tales of debauchery and Germany's seedy underbelly, the themes and social insight feel unnervingly modern. Teaming up once again with his muse Louise Brooks, the Kansas-born starlet plays Thymian, the naive daughter of a wealthy pharmacist who, in the opening scene, watches their maid leave the family home in shame when Thymian's father (Josef Rovensky) gets her pregnant.

Although it's clear to the audience, Thymian is puzzled as to why the girl has left. Her father's assistant, the creepy and much older Meinert (Fritz Rasp), invites her to the pharmacy that night on the promise to tell her everything, but instead takes advantage of the young girl and gets her pregnant. When the baby arrives, Thymian refuses to reveal who the father is but her family learn the truth from her diary, and insist that the two marry to avoid damage to the family's reputation. When she refuses, Thymian's baby is taken from her and she is packed off to a reformatory watched over by the intimidating director (Andrews Engelmann) and his tyrannical wife (Valeska Gert). After rebelling against the school, Thymian and a friend escape and join a brothel,

Like many films made during the Weimar era, Diary of a Lost Girl depicts the decay in almost every aspect of German society at the time. The lives of the rich are stripped bare, and their motivations are heavily questioned when the family send Thymian away not with her 'rehabilitation' in mind, but simply to save face. The reformatory itself is a cold and bleak place, where the director's wife bangs a rhythm for the inhabitants to rigidly eat their soup too. They are less concerned with helping the girls fit back into the society that has failed them, and more about satisfying their own sadistic desires. In one particularly effective close-up, the wife seems to be achieving some sort of sexual gratification from her monstrous behaviour.

The one place Thymian feels accepted on any sort of level is the brothel, a place where she can be herself without any kind of judgement or fear of social exile. While Thymian can at times be frustratingly naive and swoonish whenever she finds herself in the arms of a man, Louise Brooks delivers a tour de force performance that helps the audience maintain sympathy for her put-upon character, even when the film is at its most melodramatic. Even though the film is now 87 years old, Brooks's acting feels completely modern. Where most silent actors switch between rigid and operatic in their performances, Brooks is naturalistic and subtle, making it clear just why Pabst was so eager to work with her again after Pandora's Box, made the same year.