Saturday, June 01, 2019

Die Puppe [The Doll] (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919)

Top marks for this one. The Eureka Blu-ray looks absolutely tremendous - gorgeous tinting - and the film is a delight throughout. The conceit of a woman who pretends to be a doll, when the "actual" doll is played by the very same woman, facilitates some lovely games with the ways that film can make humans seem like machines (and indeed machines like humans). Lubitsch and Ossi Oswalda play wonderfully with this facility in order both to exploit it and turn it against itself. While the notion of the young man terrified of sex is quite alien to us now (and the "hero", Lancelot [Hermann Thimig] gets over his phobia in a rather desultory fashion at the end of the film), it facilitates some very funny sex comedy (the dollmaker leaves Lancelot alone with what he thinks is his doll so that he can "get acquainted with the mechanism"), while Oswalda's exuberance prevents things ever getting queasily blokey.

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