'Erotikon' is the pinnacle of Swedish comedy until Bergman's sublime 'Smiles of a Summer Night'. There are many similarities between the two - a civilised contempt for Hollywood morality; a sympathy with the melancholy inherent in romantic comedy, especially the loneliness and fear of aging of beautiful women; and an interplay between life and art, especially drama.
The most shocking thing about the film is not the notorious opera scene, a hilarious parody of the kind of 'decadent' work produced in the lurid wake of Strauss's 'Salome', with its labial, human flowers looking forward to Busby Berkeley, and its largely clothes-free Queen of the Shah, writhing lubriciously, hurling herself at her husband's best friend, hurling him in jail when he refuses to reciprocate. What is even more shocking is the cynical, healthily tolerant, even amoral attitude to marriage.
In a Hollywood romantic comedy, the marriage is sacred, the goal of all the preceding plot complications. You can make fun of engagements, you can dump a dowdy fiance(e), but never marriage. In this comedy, the husband and wife are patently unsuited - Charpentier is a wealthy, slightly doddery entomologist, mocked by his students, whose mentor is a senile, shock-haired don, who seems to be missing a few bones, such is his physical bendiness; Irene, on the other hand, is a beautiful and sophisticated woman of the world, whose life is organised around satisfying her pleasures (trips to the furriers, flying with a friend), but who is deeply unhappy.
The film initially suggests that she is also conducting an affair, but this is apparently not so. In fact, the sheer lack of sex, the frustration of forced abstinence, the quelling of passionate, but socially unacceptable feelings, is the comic motor of the film, with all the characters' repression displaced onto the decor, with its audaciously phallic and vulval bibelots; the innuendos; the running motif of butterflies and insects (free; polygamous; caught; classifed; trapped in a glass case); and the hilarious intertitles which are framed by gorgous art-deco illustrations that provide a mocking commentary on the events.
'Erotikon' has been called a precursor to Lubitsch, with its part-satiric, part-romantic look at the upper-classes, the games they play, the roles they assume. Like Lubitsch, Stiller uses the techniques of farce, where the geometry of plot and the manipulation of space leads to complications, misunderstandings, provocations, accidents. The use of the Charpentier hallway, for instance, with its angular spaces; and the emphasis on fetishised detail (Irene's gloves and feet; the 'striptease' in front of the sculptor when she removes her coat) are all to be found in Lubitsch.
But the work also looks ahead to two other European masters. just as 'Lord Arne's Treasure' looked forward to 'Le Grande Illusion', so 'Erotikon' has elements that would flower in Renoir's masterpiece 'The Rules of the Game' - the tragicomedy of the upper-classes, the complication between the heroine and a flyer, the play with the spaces of an aristocratic house. Meanwhile, the plot turn towards infidelity, betrayed friendships and duels seems like a parodic precursor to the anguished romances of Ophuls. The complex use of mirrors and framing, already a feature of Stiller's work in the 'Thomas Graal' films, are richly Ophulsian.
But Stiller was a master in his own right, one who gave the audience what they wanted - a happy ending - and blithely left them to wonder if that was what they REALLY wanted.
The most shocking thing about the film is not the notorious opera scene, a hilarious parody of the kind of 'decadent' work produced in the lurid wake of Strauss's 'Salome', with its labial, human flowers looking forward to Busby Berkeley, and its largely clothes-free Queen of the Shah, writhing lubriciously, hurling herself at her husband's best friend, hurling him in jail when he refuses to reciprocate. What is even more shocking is the cynical, healthily tolerant, even amoral attitude to marriage.
In a Hollywood romantic comedy, the marriage is sacred, the goal of all the preceding plot complications. You can make fun of engagements, you can dump a dowdy fiance(e), but never marriage. In this comedy, the husband and wife are patently unsuited - Charpentier is a wealthy, slightly doddery entomologist, mocked by his students, whose mentor is a senile, shock-haired don, who seems to be missing a few bones, such is his physical bendiness; Irene, on the other hand, is a beautiful and sophisticated woman of the world, whose life is organised around satisfying her pleasures (trips to the furriers, flying with a friend), but who is deeply unhappy.
The film initially suggests that she is also conducting an affair, but this is apparently not so. In fact, the sheer lack of sex, the frustration of forced abstinence, the quelling of passionate, but socially unacceptable feelings, is the comic motor of the film, with all the characters' repression displaced onto the decor, with its audaciously phallic and vulval bibelots; the innuendos; the running motif of butterflies and insects (free; polygamous; caught; classifed; trapped in a glass case); and the hilarious intertitles which are framed by gorgous art-deco illustrations that provide a mocking commentary on the events.
'Erotikon' has been called a precursor to Lubitsch, with its part-satiric, part-romantic look at the upper-classes, the games they play, the roles they assume. Like Lubitsch, Stiller uses the techniques of farce, where the geometry of plot and the manipulation of space leads to complications, misunderstandings, provocations, accidents. The use of the Charpentier hallway, for instance, with its angular spaces; and the emphasis on fetishised detail (Irene's gloves and feet; the 'striptease' in front of the sculptor when she removes her coat) are all to be found in Lubitsch.
But the work also looks ahead to two other European masters. just as 'Lord Arne's Treasure' looked forward to 'Le Grande Illusion', so 'Erotikon' has elements that would flower in Renoir's masterpiece 'The Rules of the Game' - the tragicomedy of the upper-classes, the complication between the heroine and a flyer, the play with the spaces of an aristocratic house. Meanwhile, the plot turn towards infidelity, betrayed friendships and duels seems like a parodic precursor to the anguished romances of Ophuls. The complex use of mirrors and framing, already a feature of Stiller's work in the 'Thomas Graal' films, are richly Ophulsian.
But Stiller was a master in his own right, one who gave the audience what they wanted - a happy ending - and blithely left them to wonder if that was what they REALLY wanted.