Deborah Ross

Box of delights | 31 May 2018

François Ozon's L'Amant Double, meanwhile, feels 90 years long

Two films this week, one that has stood the test of time, dazzlingly — it still feels as fresh as a daisy, almost 90 years on — and another that’s so tiresome it felt almost 90 years long.

First, Pandora’s Box, directed by G.W. Pabst in 1929, starring Louise Brooks and her iconic hair-do. It is always described as ‘a masterpiece of silent cinema’, which, let’s admit it, can strike fear into the heart of the average cinemagoer. It’ll be primitive, vaudevillian, barely watchable. There will be exaggerated hand-flapping and over-the-top faces. There will be a woman tied to the railway tracks and a moustached villain or, if it’s a comedy, then some poor bastard will surely get a plank in his face or will mistakenly wrestle his boss’s wife to the ground, ha ha. But with Pandora’s Box you forget that it’s black and white. You forget that the internet has yet to happen, or ready-made pastry. You forget that more than two hours have gone by. You forget because it’s completely modern — 100 per cent gripping and involving. I watched it with an early teenager, who said afterwards: ‘That was great.’ Could there even be a higher compliment? Given she could have been watching Real Housewives of Orange County.

The film hooks you in from the start, opening with Lulu (Brooks) dressed in peignoir in a Berlin art deco flat. She is gorgeous, vivacious, full of life and sexually confident as she flirts with the man who has come to read the meter. She is next visited by an old fella who may be her father or may be a kind of pimp (or both) and she sits on his lap, affectionately, until they are disturbed by another man, who lets himself in with his own keys.

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