Pandora’s Box is a fantastic film and an enduring screen classic largely for Louise Brooks, who is — and this is a term which may be over-used but is, for once, fairly accurate — iconic here: beautiful, transfixing, making the film twice as good as it already is. She plays Lulu, a woman who uses her abundant charms to win over people but who finds herself nevertheless on the back foot thanks to the constant, overbearing demands made on her by the patriarchal systems of control within her society. It looks gorgeous and it’s never less than engrossing, as she gets into all kinds of trouble, largely coming from her lack of money and education — the film is very pointed about class — and tries desperately, yet with effortless grace, to move away from those forces of capital and control that hold her down.
(Written on 19 November 2017.)
FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director G.W. Pabst; Writers Pabst and Ladislaus Vajda (based on the plays Die Büsche der Pandora and Erdgeist by Frank Wedekind); Cinematographer Günther Krampf; Starring Louise Brooks, Fritz Körtner, Francis Lederer, Carl Goetz, Alice Roberts; Length 133 minutes.
Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT1), London, Sunday 19 November 2017 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, January 1998).
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