Die Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s Box aka Loulou] (1929)

(On Cable TV, March 2019) I have enough trouble with 1920s American silent dramas that going for a German one is just adding an additional degree of difficulty to the process. But Pandora’s Box is considered a classic of Weimar Germany cinema, and since I’ve seen many of its contemporaries, I thought I’d boldly charge forward. As it turns out, despite its punishing two-hour-plus length, Pandora’s Box has just enough naughtiness to keep things interesting. A film about a young woman brazenly using her seductive charms to eke out a living, it features a kind of strong self-driven female character (a frank performance from Louise Brooks) that would not be seen again for decades. It’s still a struggle to get through the film thanks to its rough technical aspects, melodramatic excess, endless title cards and tepid rhythm, but it does have enough strengths to be striking. The depiction of female sexuality (especially as it’s leveraged for money and comfort) is provocative, although the film cannot resist final moralism with a finale so gratuitously bleak that it becomes almost caricatural. Pandora’s Box is not interesting enough to leap from the historical-interest list to a more accessible status, but it’s really not as dull as I feared it would have been.