Loving Lulu
Pandora's Box
Directed by G.W. Pabst
During the last Louise Brooks vogue, every urbane New Yorker's bookshelf or coffee table prominently featured Lulu in Hollywood, the 1982 picture-book autobiography by the Kansas girl who became a movie legend during Germany's silent era and a scandale in early Hollywood. In the '80s, the revival of Brooks' films in repertory movie houses made her a new sexual icon. Her image awakened popular notions of sexuality at the same time as Bruce Weber's then-new Madison Avenue homoerotica. Brooks enjoyed a triumph of vintage audacity.
Film Forum recycles the Brooks legend with this week's opening of G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box. That 1928 film gave a name to Brooks' legend (she plays the lead role of femme fatale Lulu based on Frank Wedekind's play which was also the source of Alba Berg's opera Lulu). But it isn't likely that the film will have the same galvanizing effect on the culture as last time around. Today's media is so inundated with sex-god aspirants that Brooks is no longer a source of surprise. Brooks' casual body language and direct stare broke the conventions of silent movie acting; her clarity still shines through layers and years of movie nostalgia. But what value can Brooks' unabashed sexual intelligence have in a film culture that doesn't know what to do with Angelina Jolie or Beyoncé? It's ironic that Brooks always seems so modern while her films (including Diary of a Lost Girl and The Loves of Jeanne Ney) cling to ancient, punitive notions of sexuality. With her long, dark bangs, short bob in back and a flirty curl around her ear-the "helmet" hairdo that makes her resemble a hood ornament of art deco audacity-Brooks is a quintessential American force in a European environment. When she moves, she advances through the traffic of sexual mores, female social roles and male insecurity. Those are the themes of Pandora's Box, a heated-up melodrama in which Brooks' Lulu is both victimizer and victim.
"She'll be the death of me," says the big-time, middle-aged publisher who bucks propriety to marry her. Meanwhile, Lulu entices the publisher's adult son and any other man-and some women-who get trapped in her dark-eyed gaze.
Brooks' presence confirms the complexity of sex. Pabst's title alludes to the Greek mythological figure who foolishly unleashed vice and disease upon the world, yet he also dares to employ the title's smarmy innuendo. It is Lulu's sexuality that entraps men.
Pabst dramatizes the price that must be paid for Lulu's enticement, and it's felt in the film's atmosphere of psychological hysteria-frenzied passions acted out in dark, shadowy tableaux. This not only anticipates film noir but summons the real life specter of Jack the Ripper. Pabst exploits the power of sexuality while also condemning it-a paradox that judges Brooks' unorthodox demeanor as decadent when she's simply guileless.
This time around, the lesson of Pandora's Box is that Pabst's paradox (sexual attraction and moral squeamishness) is still with us. It recommenced with last spring's London, a highly verbal erotic thriller which pinpointed male insecurities about sexuality. Using sex as language and emotion as argument, writer-director Hunter Richards explored Chris Evans, Jessica Biel, Jason Statham and Joy Bryant's physical charms and psychological confusion; each performer was as blatantly arousing as Brooks ever was. Yet critics were hostile to the film's bold articulation of the same moral tensions felt in Pandora's Box. Film Forum's revival suggests that if moviegoers respond to its challenge, they might be ready to take Evans, Biel, Statham and Bryant's heat. The new London DVD also deserves a place on every urbane New Yorker's media shelf and nightstand.