The laughing girl with the black helmet of hair and the sexy bangs… You don’t have to know who she was to be drawn in. Every photograph of Louise Brooks demands your attention. She was something new in America: The girl next door who actually liked sex. That was revolutionary in 1928. Hell, it’s still revolutionary, for even as we inject every aspect of pop culture with sexual tension, we force Good Girls and Whores to sleep in separate bedrooms. Painfully confusing to all—but true. Louise’s fresh-faced acceptance of her own desires was part of the public persona that made her famous. She embodied the flapper—a modern kind of girl who saw no reason to deny herself pleasure, even if it took her over the edge. She’d be forgotten today if not for one film, legendary German director G.W. Pabst’s: Pandora’s Box. It’s her living monument, the portrayal that made the Cinémathèque Française declare famously: There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks! She plays the iconic Lulu—a childlike woman whose sexual desires destroy her, and destroy the men in her life as well. Louise Brooks and Lulu had everything in common, and the actress and the role became hopelessly, dangerously enmeshed. Exploring that is the main thrust of Lulu—a film about a real person that is anything but a cradle-to-grave biopic. Instead, think of Shadow of the Vampire. Or Adaptation—with a mad dash of Moulin Rouge. This is an imaginative, vivid, sometimes hallucinogenic take on sex, art, and love. Decadent pre-war Berlin and Hollywood give color and mood. Rock and roll sets the soundtrack miles from the quaint world of the silent movie. And sex is the key to understanding the journey of the heart as well as the path of the artist. The central relationship is between Louise and Pabst. She is a hard-drinking hedonist who sees pleasure as a way of feeling alive. He is a conservative married man with seemingly few secrets. Together they are propelled by a curious mixture of attraction, personal history, and identification with the story of Pandora’s Box. Their own fears, kinks, and passions are interwoven throughout the telling of Lulu’s journey. But as the character Lulu careens toward destruction and death, an entirely different destiny seems to await Louise. She believes she is at the start of a great career. And we think so too. It’s a bumpy ride, but we still are lead to expect that most inevitable of Hollywood endings, the one where the girl goes out a chorus girl and comes back a star. That is how it always works out, right? Louise and Pabst’s affair takes wild twists and turns during filming. But his respect and feeling for her emerges fully. He asks sacrifices of her throughout—not in service to his ego—but to the film. Lulu’s ultimate degradation and death seems happy to Louise. She doesn’t see it as defeat, but as the perfect fulfillment of everything the character has always wanted in her secret heart of hearts. Even Lulu’s descent into prostitution seems happy in the hands of Louise, who refuses to judge the character. Her death at the hands of a homicidal madman in the film becomes the birth of the real Louise Brooks—an artist of infinite skill and depth—a woman who is at the top of her game. Whatever Lulu’s fate, Louise’s own acceptance of self, of her sexuality, of living life on her own terms feels like a victory. What she has accomplished here in Berlin is monumental—she has discovered herself as an artist and as a woman. She and Pabst crow in triumph that nothing and no one can stop her. We end with that manic energy, that certainty of a bright, fabulous future for her. She will have the entire planet at her feet. The world will love Lulu and the world will love Louise Brooks! |
|