Pandora's Box

Louise Brooks. Berlin. The Twenties.

Reviewed by Audra Schroeder, Fri., Nov. 24, 2006

Pandora's Box

Criterion, $39.95

Kirsten Dunst's knowing smirk in Marie Antoinette (and pretty much every other movie she's done) must have been born of Louise Brooks. The girl can't help it: She knew how to simmer, seduction the inevitable conclusion. In Austrian auteur G.W. Pabst's stylish 1929 silent film, shot in Berlin, iconic star and former Ziegfeld girl Brooks is Lulu, a temperamental, magnetic showgirl. We see her harem immediately: Fritz Körtner plays newspaper editor and frustrated lover Dr. Schön; his son Alwa (Franz Lederer) is also her lover; lovable drunkard and former pimp Schigolch (Carl Goetz) is comic relief.

The way the camera lingers on Brooks is voyeuristic; she, in turn, is oblivious to the fact we're there – the scene where she swings on the arm of muscle-head producer Rodrigo Quast is a classic example. Of course, her naivete and sexuality poison everything. Scenes between Lulu and Countess Geschwitz (Alice Roberts, a dead ringer for Chloë Sevigny), especially on the dancefloor at Lulu's wedding to an unhinged Schön, are smoldering yet brief. Lulu thrives on the tension. In an earlier scene, she and Schön are caught in the throes of passion on a closet floor by Alwa and Schön's fiancée. Brooks' victorious, devilish smile must have melted Pabst's monocle. (If Hitchcock had directed Gypsy, it might resemble Pandora's Box; just replace the cool blonde with the blistering brunette.) Even in the courtroom death-sentencing scene, Brooks, ravishing in all black, peers through her lowered veil with amusement. She is not the strong heroine or the submissive wife; she was allowed to become Lulu because she was living it – this was Berlin in the late Twenties, after all.

With four different scores to choose (the "cabaret" score chosen got a bit too "new age" in parts), second-disc offerings (a Hugh Hefner-produced documentary on Brooks, plus a rare interview from the Seventies), and a collection of essays on the film, this box – not surprisingly – delivers the definitive take.