Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

stephander Though critically acclaimed, this 1920 film is interesting only from a historical perspective. It was directed notably by the great Swedish director Mauritz Stiller (he was actually a Jew from Finland), who had already directed dozens of films and was a master of his craft. Although he was yet to create his masterpiece The Saga of Gosta Berling, he would only direct a handful of films before his failed residency in Hollywood and premature death in 1928. Also worthy of mention is the film's male lead, a premiere Swedish actor, Lars Hanson, who would famously star several times with Stiller's great discovery Greta Garbo. Erotikon, though, scarcely lives up to its salacious title. It may have been somewhat daring in 1920, but today it is less apt to raise eyebrows than to close eyelids. There must have been a hundred silent features that would deal more compellingly with the theme of the errant wife and the dull husband. While there is no question Stiller has grasped the art of motion picture making -- the acting and camera-work and editing are polished and some of the title cards are witty, artistically the film is a disappointment. Even for one accustomed to the conventions of silent films, it is painfully slow and devoid of arresting incident. Only the unconventional ending (which I won't divulge) somewhat saves it. And the nicely restored Kino version unhappily features a musical score which does little to arise audience interest or connection to the plot. Its atrocious fiddle-scraping may be apt for the contemplation of suicide, but after a half hour or so its annoying discordance becomes unbearable and anyone of auditory sensibilities will soon be reduced to viewing this feature in grateful silence.

movingpicturegal Huge, dead tree beetles, a long-haired Arabian beauty dancing an erotic, half-naked dance of the veils wearing an exotic peacock-feathered headdress, and a niece who secretly likes to kick up her legs and smoke, makes mutton and cabbage casserole, and flirts with her own uncle - just a few of the things featured in this somewhat weird, but interesting, and even, at times, mildly amusing silent film. The film is about Leo, a professor of entomology and his tired-looking, bored "touched with melancholy" wife Irene, who has a crush on her husband's best friend, a handsome sculptor named Preben (Lars Hanson). Preben is in love with Irene as well, but holds back because of his friendship with her husband. Meanwhile, Leo flirts with, of all things, his own niece (and she must be a blood relative as she has the same last name as him!). Jealousies ensue.I thought the film was pretty well done and enjoyable, though a bit slow in parts. The music score that accompanies this film didn't really suit the story very well and was pretty heavy and gloomy for most of the film - in fact, it was really getting on my nerves (not in a good way) for the last half hour or so. The music did suit the story in a few places though - namely, a scene where they attend the opera to see this fantasy ballet featuring the on-stage tale of a Shah and his beautiful "favorite wife", and my favorite scene in the film - an interesting bit of photography in which Irene takes a flight with another of her flirtations, Baron Felix, and we watch their little plane as it sours through the air, Irene's scarf flying in the open air cockpit, and camera strapped to the wings as it looks through the moving clouds to the landscape below. Well done. The print of this looked very good, tinted in most scenes a sort of bright yellow-brown shade.

mgmax A professor has a bit of an infatuation with his niece; the professor's wife, a cosmopolitan lady of leisure, takes up with a flashy aviator, mainly, it seems, to torment a sculptor who loves her; turn up the heat, stir, and wait for the boil...The DVD release's jacket does a mild disservice to Mauritz Stiller's Erotikon (1920) by stating that its slyly sardonic approach to sexual intrigue inspired Ernst Lubitsch. As the only Lubitsch film I've seen that predates Erotikon is the preposterous and galumphing Eyes of the Mummy, I'm prepared to accept that Lubitsch had a significant epiphany that helped him become the sort of filmmaker who could make The Marriage Circle. But the expectation is thus set that Erotikon will have an effervescent comic pace and a constantly winking eye like a Lubitsch film of the 30s-- and that is not the case. A better touchstone for the film is The Rules of the Game (not least because an aviator plays so prominent a role), a movie which observes, with the sad empathy of a veteran priest with many Saturdays spent listening to confession behind him, the desperate efforts of a group of humans to chase after happiness-- only to make things worse in most cases. Erotikon begins with a fussy middle-aged professor lecturing on bigamous beetles (oddly anticipating the recent movie biography of Dr. Kinsey), and takes a consciously scientific detachment toward its characters as they scurry about, trying to keep mortality at bay by finding some form of erotic excitement in lives which are a bit too settled, under-occupied and, it appears, sexually frustrated. A comedy, yes, and even one that wraps up in high spirits, and yet a comedy that's touched throughout by melancholy, and played with a sort of gravity and a deliberate pace that gives us time to feel the hurt under the surface.Or so it seemed to me when I watched it tonight. Then I watched the "intro" by the film scholar Peter Cowie, and learned that Erotikon is quite the opposite. Unlike Smiles of a Summer Night, another obvious comparison, Erotikon's comedy does not have a moralistic melancholy undertone, says Cowie. What struck me as gravity, like Preston Sturges slowed down to Douglas Sirk if not Carl Dreyer, strikes Cowie as "frothy."How to account for the fact that Cowie sees a completely different Erotikon than I do? Well, for one thing, I suppose he has far more experience of Scandinavian cinema on which to build his preconceptions; next to a diet of Sjostrom, Bergman, Strindberg and Hamsun, Erotikon IS frothy, I'm sure. And I doubt he had seen it, the first few times at least, with the particular score on this DVD, a Celtic dirge that seems to belong to a production of "The Death of Cuchulain" more than it does to a 1920s drawing room comedy; it certainly puts the film in a dourer key than a conventional romantic comedy score would have. Maybe I'll try watching it again with something peppier, and see if it's a different movie.Adding to the uncertainty of tone is the fact that the film contains a wide variety of acting styles. Tora Teje (as the socialite wife) and Lars Hanson (as the sculptor) are highly effective in a theatrical, heightened-naturalism sort of way, while Anders de Wahl as the husband and especially Torsten Hammaren as an aged professor who seems to be the Swedish answer to Mr. Muckle in It's a Gift are caricatures of woolly-headed academia. It's a bit like Deborah Kerr in Bonjour Tristesse being married to Fred MacMurray in The Absent-Minded Professor.Despite this mismatch-- perhaps to be expected in such a trailblazing comedy with no apparent models to follow, other than its stage original-- Erotikon is a striking and interesting film, one of the few silents that seems to leap out of the period, untouched by the customary moralizing Victorian preconceptions of what is proper behavior for its characters (and proper punishment for those who violate it). Erotikon simply observes what these creatures do naturally; applying morals to them would be self-delusion, and Erotikon is a movie largely free of illusions.

Alice Liddel 'Erotikon' is the pinnacle of Swedish comedy until Bergman's sublime 'Smiles of a Summer Night'. There are many similarities between the two - a civilised contempt for Hollywood morality; a sympathy with the melancholy inherent in romantic comedy, especially the loneliness and fear of aging of beautiful women; and an interplay between life and art, especially drama. The most shocking thing about the film is not the notorious opera scene, a hilarious parody of the kind of 'decadent' work produced in the lurid wake of Strauss's 'Salome', with its labial, human flowers looking forward to Busby Berkeley, and its largely clothes-free Queen of the Shah, writhing lubriciously, hurling herself at her husband's best friend, hurling him in jail when he refuses to reciprocate. What is even more shocking is the cynical, healthily tolerant, even amoral attitude to marriage. In a Hollywood romantic comedy, the marriage is sacred, the goal of all the preceding plot complications. You can make fun of engagements, you can dump a dowdy fiance(e), but never marriage. In this comedy, the husband and wife are patently unsuited - Charpentier is a wealthy, slightly doddery entomologist, mocked by his students, whose mentor is a senile, shock-haired don, who seems to be missing a few bones, such is his physical bendiness; Irene, on the other hand, is a beautiful and sophisticated woman of the world, whose life is organised around satisfying her pleasures (trips to the furriers, flying with a friend), but who is deeply unhappy. The film initially suggests that she is also conducting an affair, but this is apparently not so. In fact, the sheer lack of sex, the frustration of forced abstinence, the quelling of passionate, but socially unacceptable feelings, is the comic motor of the film, with all the characters' repression displaced onto the decor, with its audaciously phallic and vulval bibelots; the innuendos; the running motif of butterflies and insects (free; polygamous; caught; classifed; trapped in a glass case); and the hilarious intertitles which are framed by gorgous art-deco illustrations that provide a mocking commentary on the events.'Erotikon' has been called a precursor to Lubitsch, with its part-satiric, part-romantic look at the upper-classes, the games they play, the roles they assume. Like Lubitsch, Stiller uses the techniques of farce, where the geometry of plot and the manipulation of space leads to complications, misunderstandings, provocations, accidents. The use of the Charpentier hallway, for instance, with its angular spaces; and the emphasis on fetishised detail (Irene's gloves and feet; the 'striptease' in front of the sculptor when she removes her coat) are all to be found in Lubitsch. But the work also looks ahead to two other European masters. just as 'Lord Arne's Treasure' looked forward to 'Le Grande Illusion', so 'Erotikon' has elements that would flower in Renoir's masterpiece 'The Rules of the Game' - the tragicomedy of the upper-classes, the complication between the heroine and a flyer, the play with the spaces of an aristocratic house. Meanwhile, the plot turn towards infidelity, betrayed friendships and duels seems like a parodic precursor to the anguished romances of Ophuls. The complex use of mirrors and framing, already a feature of Stiller's work in the 'Thomas Graal' films, are richly Ophulsian. But Stiller was a master in his own right, one who gave the audience what they wanted - a happy ending - and blithely left them to wonder if that was what they REALLY wanted.