January 5: The Doll/Die Puppe (1919 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★★

This is a funny movie.  It’s 1919, but there are already filmic elements that persist to today.  The cute, smart-aleck kid, for one, reminds me of the kids in so many TV sit-coms today, and the story is a romantic comedy that ends in marriage.  I was a little surprised to see these already so well-developed in 1919.

The Doll is also another early film that plays with question of what a human is.  The doll here is not far from the machine that will imitate Maria eight years later in Metropolis, and we see some of the same concern about the mechanization of humanity in Eisenstein’s Strike and Potemkin.  And, later, in Charlie Chaplin.   Somnambulism suggests a human body without human consciousness, too, and that plays a role in The Doll as it will the following year in Dr. Caligari.  And all this brings to mind the human/nonhuman intersection in Island of Lost Souls (1933), where animal and human consciousness battle in bodies that are human and animal.  But all these later films take a serious approach to the subject; in The Doll, Lubitsch uses his mechanized creature as a device for satire and for comedy.

And The Doll bursts with good humor.  There is satire about specific institutions like the monastery and the court, and there is satire about human nature as we see the relatives checking out their future inheritance and finding a chamber pot.  I don’t know exactly what to make out of Lancelot, the hero, but much of the comedy revolves around him.  He’s either gay or just a dandy who is inexperienced and insecure around women, but whatever his situation, his character leads us to a lot of the laughs in the film.  The chase scene as he runs around the city pursued by the nubile women is very funny -- and a device we still see in comedy today -- and there is additional humor as the sequence is intercut with the occasional aside of the sulking boyfriends the women have abandoned to pursue royalty. Likewise, the wedding is memorably comic. I’m especially fond of the horses that pull Lancelot's carriage at one point.

I also like the opening of the film a lot.  The Doll starts with the Lubitsch himself taking miniature props out of a box and arranging a set that the film soon cuts to with Hilarious walking down the hillside of the prop.  I’d guess this self-reflective, anti-mimetic  gesture arises from the same modern theatrical background that Bertold Brecht was contemporaneously participating in.  But Lubitsch’s comic sensibility comes into play here because the set he constructs for the audience is impossibly small; in fact, his “distancing effect” of showing the props as fake only add to a mimetic sense by making the opening itself feel real.  But this first scene underscores the theatrical irreality of the rest of The Doll’s sets.

I like Lubitsch’s comedy, whether it’s the “Lubitsch Touch” or whatever.  Never broad or heavy-handed, Lubitsch is deft with his humor.  He brings an intelligent lightness to his satire and a delicacy to his situational comedy. 

It was a pleasure to find that touch again in this film.