LILIOM IS A purgatorial film for director Fritz Lang, poised ...
purgatorial film for director Fritz Lang, poised halfway between hell (Nazi Germany) and heaven (Hollywood). Coming at a turning point in his career-just after Goebbels' request to join him in making Nazi propaganda films sent him on the first train to Paris, but before he found his true second home in Hollywood-Liliom is a truly odd admixture of Renoir-esque naturalism (akin to the great French master's La Bete Humaine and Toni) and the sub-genre of heavenly judgment films, serving as a beacon for such later cinematic fantasies of eternity as Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death.
Starring Charles Boyer as Liliom, a carnival barker with tendencies toward self-dissipation and spousal abuse who is attracted to a life of crime by his wife's unexpected pregnancy, the first two-thirds of Liliom is textbook naturalism. Its doomed working-class protagonist, prone to such pronouncements as "justice is all about false collars," could come straight from a lesser-known novel by Emile Zola. One of the film's characters runs a photography studio, whose atmosphere of forced casualness is a marked contrast to the naturalist endeavor, which hits all the key nodes of working-class life here-carnival, police station, street life and crime scene. Like the Renoir films, though, Liliom has a dreariness to it that cannot be shaken off, even by the title character's party-hearty attitude and evident sexual magnetism.
Lang's perennial creativity in utilizing visuals to tell his story is evident here, from the heart carved in wood that is steadily covered over by other lovers' hearts to indicate the passage of time, to the heavenly film projection used to show reprobates evidence of their misdeeds. The oddity sets in when Liliom dies in a botched robbery and ascends to a celestial bureaucratic office, looking suspiciously like the police station he was called into during his earthly existence. Accompanied by a pair of Cocteau-esque, black-clad messengers of death, Liliom argues for one more chance at setting things straight with his long-suffering wife and the daughter he never got to know. The final, heavenly portion of Liliom, with its starchy air of whimsy and forced emotion, stands as a precursor to the far superior comic dramas of mortality later crafted by Powell and Pressburger, and even to Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait. Liliom's bizarre shifts in tone renders it a way-station in Lang's magnificent career, an oddity scrunched between the triumphs of his German and American periods.
SAUL AUSTERLITZ