Die Büchse der Pandora/Pandora's Box (1929)

Country: Germany

Released: January 30th, 1929

Genre: Drama

Directed by: G.W. Pabst

Produced by: Seymour Nebenza

Written by:  G. W. Pabst, Ladislaus Vajda

Die Büchse der Pandora is the story of Lulu (Louise Brooks), a young prostitute in Weimar Germany who courts the affections of an upper middle-class newspaper editor named Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kotner). As the title suggests, Lulu attracts danger and chaos wherever she goes, a phenomenon directly alluded to in the film itself. After manipulating Schön to break off his engagement to another woman, infidelity, a botched suicide, and a manslaughter sentence send Lulu, her father (Carl Goetz), and the newspaper editor’s son Alwa (Francis Lederer) on the run from the authorities. What follows is a rapid decent to destitution and depravity, culminating in Lulu’s death at the hands of a Jack the Ripper-esque serial killer.

The film is regrettably scatter-brained, hanging its inconsistent narrative on long-since tread thematic ground: the corrupting nature of greed and lust. It’s a story we’ve seen in films like Greed, Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans, and that one where that one dude is competing with his son for the affection of his adopted daughter (remember that one? I do), to name a few. This is not necessarily surprising given the period. The roaring twenties where nothing if not a time for moral decay, where Victorian social norms were broken down by political radicalism and social realignments. Wealth and hedonism where the name of the game, baby, and it only makes sense that these became thematic focal points for films of the period. Unfortunately, the list seems fond of these and has made an effort to saturate its contents with films that tackle these, giving everything an acute “been-there, done-that” feeling. Look at the films seen so far on the list, and it is probably the most common topic behind war-fatigue and communist propaganda.

Much like the other films mentioned above Die Büchse is a character study, focusing on the polarizing Lulu, who embodies a strange hybrid of femme fatal and innocence. Characters like Lulu, i.e. fallen prostitutes, at once represent the morally corrupting nature of modernity, what with it’s sexually charged allure, and simultaneously the lost innocence corrupted by said modernity. This is a film trope as old as the medium itself, employed by post-War Korean and pre-revolutionary Chinese cinema to grapple with the anxiety of creeping modernity, and deconstructed relatively recently in Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust;Caution in the character of Wong Chia-Chi (Tang Wei). That European cinema is choked with the same anxieties during their own ascent to modernity a few decades prior is unsurprising.

Lulu as this thematic focal point emerges as Die Büchse’s greatest strength and weakness. Louise Brooks is transcendent as Lulu, breathing life into an otherwise rote character. It cannot be overemphasized how magnificent her performance is. Tinged with a quiet (at least initially) tragedy, Brooks turns the otherwise wholly unsympathetic, underhanded Lulu into a fallen soul, drawing the audience into a misguided struggle to survive. Closeups of Brooks’ soft visage leaves knots in one’s chest, and at once all her past sins are forgiven, leaving a very human creature. It is almost enough to make up for the film’s deficiencies.

Unfortunately, the unfocused plot does this phenomenal performance little favours. Jumping between Schön’s love-triangle, to his marriage with Lulu, to his murder and Lulu’s trial in the span of less than an hour left me reeling. Truly, the first half of this film could have been stretched into the full two-hour run-time, but instead the story takes a huge leap that leaves the audience unable to place themselves within the narrative landscape. Lulu shifts between manipulative to tragic so suddenly that for the entire first half of the film I struggled to figure out what her or the movie’s “deal” was (at one point I was convinced it was subtle anti-Semitic propaganda, but I won’t get into why). As mentioned Brooks salvages the character as much as she can with the material given, but frankly she deserved a more consistent vision to work with and make the most of her work. That Lulu is frenetic is entirely on the script, not her.

As such, sympathy towards Lulu, on which the most interesting thematic crux rests, wanes. The title implies an analogy between the tale of Pandora and Lulu: a woman brings evil onto the word, if unwittingly. This however buckles under the weight of the film’s narrative inconsistency. The point of the Pandora allegory is that in the face of horrors hope remains, but the attempt to convey this at the end of the film comes off as weak when held-up against the story’s trajectory. Alwa is still destitute and Lulu is murdered at the hands of a deus ex machina. What hope does he gain from Lulu’s death? Why was her death necessary? I understand that, within the context of the period’s themes a creature like Lulu cannot exist without destabilizing the status quo, but her death is handled so clumsily it felt wholly contrived. In retrospect, the serial killer represents the malignant lust created by Lulu’s moral decay, thus making her demise at once a punishment for her transgressions and a tragic loss of innocence, but I maintain that from purely story-telling stance it weakens the film as a whole. Furthermore, while Pandora does unleash evil she does so unwittingly, depending on how you read the story. Lulu is fully aware of her evil actions; her sympathy stems from the circumstances that led her to become the kind of person who could perpetrate them. Thus, the analogy too comes off as contrived.

In truth, the film’s strength lies in the moments within the mess, like Brooks’ performance or small character interactions. My favourite of these is when Lulu and the serial-killer who would become her doom pause to look at a flickering candle in her cold hovel. It is an warm moment between two social-outcasts, who overcome their isolation to experience true intimacy, however brief. It is quite touching, and I wish it was contextualized better.

Additionally, cinematographer Günther Krampf deserves an award for his brilliant framing, which weaves visual metaphor into otherwise dull scenes for moving effect. I’ll take heavy-handed visual symbolism over rote, by the numbers film-making any day. The lighting is one of the best on the list so far. Harsh shadows employed alongside heavy fog in the last twenty minutes create an overwhelming sense of dread, and it’s quite stunning.

Still, regrettably Die Büchse is less than the sum of its parts. Engaging scenes, inspired lighting, and a wonderful performance don’t amount to much when the frame is so flimsy. More than any other film so far I felt that Die Büchse cries for dialogue to better contextualize the proceedings, or at least to better convey the character nuance that it just fell short of achieving. Perhaps others will have a better experience with Die Büchse, but much like Lulu herself I am simply left with a sense of melancholy of what could have been.