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Michael (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924)
🕑 Added 2022-06-01 00:55:32 +0000 UTC
While it's difficult not to marvel at Michael's candor regarding same-sex attraction, specifically for a film made in 1924, it may be useful to place it in context. One of Dreyer's German films made for UFA, Michael would probably be considered a canonical Weimar film had it been directed by nearly anyone else. Since Dreyer, of course, went on to become the quintessential Danish master, it's more common for Michael to be regarded first and foremost as a Dreyer film, one of the pre-Joan of Arc silents on which the director was cutting his teeth.
But the film, adapted from the 1902 novel by Danish journalist Herman Bang, was co-adapted by Dreyer and Thea von Harbou, the legendary UFA screenwriter and wife of Fritz Lang. The sexual frankness of Michael, while certainly tame by modern standards, exemplifies the worldly, liberal attitudes of the Weimar Republic, as well as Denmark, and is precisely the sort of artifact that would represent bourgeois decadence from 1929 onward. (The fact that von Harbou would eventually work with the Nazis at DEFA is particularly ironic, although historically speaking, ideologues love a turncoat, one who can articulate the errors of the enemy by claiming that the scales have finally fallen from their eyes.)
Allegedly based on incidents from the life of Rodin, Michael explores the pull between Claude Zoret (Danish director Benjamin Christensen), an older established artist, and his young protege Michael (a young Walter Slezak). Although Zoret frequently refers to Michael as an adopted son, there is a fairly obvious erotic fixation, cemented when the Master tells the student, essentially, that his own art is worthless but he could instead achieve greatness as Zoret's primary model. So right off the bat, the Zoret / Michael relationship is strained by a significant power differential. This functional disequilibrium is thrown off by the sudden arrival of Countess Zamikof (Nora Gregor), a noblewoman in dire economic straits hoping to regain some social footing by having Zoret paint her portrait.
In the course of her sitting for the Master, both the older and the younger man fall in love with her. This is easily the weakest aspect of the film, since its makers have neglected to give Zamikof any clear personality. She is merely a chit and a complication. But the pairing of Gregor and Slezak is a casting coup; placing her sturdy features against his childlike effeminacy goes a long way to suggest that even in the heterosexual turn, there is a fundamental queerness at work. As Michael begins to rack up debts, he starts stealing from the now-humiliated Master, who pines away for his lost "son."
As a piece of structural theater, Michael plays quite well. Every character operates at a specific register of desire and selfishness, and all can be productively organized into diametrical pairs. It is not just the collision of aesthetics and sexual desire, the fact that Michael rends upper-class decorum by being beautiful in both the Kantian and the carnal senses. Michael too has usurped the role of Zoret's confidante, previously occupied by the Master's biographer, art critic Charles Switt (Robert Garrison). This means that the bizarre love triangle is continually observed and commented upon by a thoroughly interested party. Likewise, Zoret's elderly servant Jules (Max Auzinger) blurs the lines between duty and romantic affection. Michael is a spiders' web of unacknowledged eroticism, with artmaking -- the classic form of sublimated desire, per Freud -- holding the center.
It seems like bad manners to note that Dreyer's handling of Michael, and the specific task of direction, is not always up to the film's high-level emotional chess. There are strange mismatched edits, and Dreyer is still figuring out how to leave theatrical staging behind and form a cinematic Kammerspiel. But above all, the inconsistency of some of the key performances, Christensen's in particular, blunts the intended impact of the tale. While Zoret is meant to be erasing himself in abject defeat, he often seems like a man with no clear moral center. Since it is Zoret's gravitas that, in a way, implicitly vouchsafes Michael's tangle of unconventional desires, this can be a problem. Michael's greatest asset is, at times, also its biggest liability. The narrative is ruled by outlaw passions that are as elegant as a geometric proof.
