Review: Michael

Michael resonates strongly as not only one of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s greatest triumphs.

Michael
Photo: Universum Film

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s two final works economically cover the two poles of the Danish auteur’s attitudes toward love: Ordet is a sober celebration on the ability of love to accomplish the impossible and Gertrud is a hysterical lament for a woman who insists on fixating on the impossibility of love. Dreyer’s silent film Michael, based on a turn-of-the-century novel by the controversial gay Danish author Herman Bang, concerns itself with the gloomy latter proposition, and it resonates strongly as not only one of Dreyer’s greatest triumphs—not long after the comedy The Parson’s Widow, which utilizes both elements of the love continuum—but also as one of the most daring early expressions of gay-themed melodrama.

Benjamin Christensen is the drama queen at the heart of the story, playing the middle-aged artist Zoret. Success—artistic if not popular, judging from his beyond-opulent digs courtesy of production designer Hugo Haring—appears to have eluded Zoret for the entirety of his career until the moment that Michael (Walter Slezak) entered and rocked the homosexual artist’s world with his dapper looks, vivacious temper, and tantalizing unavailability. (“Gay for pay” is about as much as Dreyer was undoubtedly allowed to suggest, and even then only indirectly.)

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With Michael serving as his model, Zoret unleashes a spate of masterful paintings that turn him into the toast of the town. Unfortunately, and in keeping with Dreyer’s unforgiving sense of fatalistic humor, his increased critical stock attracts the attention of Princess Zamikoff (Nora Gregor), who commissions Zoret to paint her. But he’s unable to correctly draw her eyes—that is, her soul—and so he hands over his brush to Michael to see if his protégée has actually learned technique from the master. A few swift brush strokes later and the painting is completed.

But, in a situation that mirrors Zoret and Michael’s creative relationship, the princess appears to have Michael eating out of her hand, as well as out of Zoret’s pocketbook. Later, a crushed Zoret responds by painting a devastating self-portrait of himself, totally wasted away and propping himself up against a violent twilight sky in the background of the painting as Michael and Zamikoff lock eyes in the foreground on either side of his near-corpse.

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Many have downplayed the film’s gay subtext, but doing so denies the power of Dreyer’s attention to the polarity of love’s vicissitudes. If stripped of the notion that Zoret’s attraction toward Michael, whose ostensible bisexuality is of an opportunistic strain, is physical as well as social, the film essentially becomes an embittered—and fairly rote, despite the astonishingly suffocating mise-en-scène—tale of two cuckolds. Regarding the second, it actually feels like Dreyer and co-writer Thea von Harbou were attempting to throw more reactionary viewers off the gay overtones of the mainstage drama with an otherwise unrelated subplot depicting the married Alice Adelsskjold’s (Grete Mosheim) affair with the Duke of Monthieu (Didier Aslan).

In both cases, though, suffering becomes the catalyst for surprisingly secular epiphanies. If adage is to be believed, God answers knee mail. But, if Dreyer’s deliciously masochistic eroticism is to be believed, the dominatrix deity might prefer it delivered with a blowjob.

Score: 
 Cast: Walter Slezak, Max Auzinger, Nora Gregor, Robert Garrison, Benjamin Christensen, Dider Aslan, Alexander Murski, Grete Moshem, Karl Freund  Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer  Screenwriter: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Thea von Harbou  Distributor: Universum Film  Running Time: 86 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1924  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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