PANDORA’S BOX (The Criterion Collection)
by Jeffrey M. Anderson, a freelance film critic living in San Francisco

The cunning, playful and shockingly sensual Louise Brooks and workaday German director G.W. Pabst formed a symbiosis to create their masterpiece, and the pinnacle of both their careers, Pandora’s Box (1928).

Brooks’ mysterious, alluring gaze was equal to Garbo’s and superior to nearly everyone else’s, before or since. She had a twinkle in her eye and a sly, dazzling smile that enchanted an army of famous lovers and short-lived husbands. And of course, no one can forget that steely crop of black hair with its severe bangs and points.

Yet the Kansas-born beauty was stuck playing small, safe parts in Hollywood when Pabst, who had seen her in Howard Hawks’ A Girl in Every Port, beckoned her to Berlin. She agreed, breaking her contract with Paramount in the process and angering the Hollywood elite.

The film’s story had already been a sensation on the German stage, and Brooks slid into the role of Lulu as if she had been born to it. A dancer and a promiscuous maneater, Lulu starts by breaking up her lover’s impending marriage to another woman and winds up hiding out with her lover’s grown son, a low-life gambler. Even more scandalous (at least at the time), she dances with a woman at her own wedding! She takes her final lover, Jack the Ripper, because she likes his looks.

Pabst directs using a few strokes from the waning German Expressionism movement, and his backstage scenes during Lulu’s big debut have been justly praised for their energy and realism. Brooks so inspired him that they teamed up for a second film, the near-great Diary of a Lost Girl (currently available on DVD from Kino International).

The Criterion Collection’s new DVD transfers Pandora’s Box from the recent 133-minute Munich Film Museum restoration, providing a depth and clarity unseen for ages. Viewers can choose from among four different musical scores, or a scholarly audio commentary track. A plethora of other extras includes the very good 1998 TV documentary, Looking for Lulu, narrated by Shirley MacLaine.

 

Look Both Ways (Kino International)
by Eddie Cockrell, Variety film critic and freelance film programmer who splits his time between Washington, D.C. and Sydney

The sort of person who imagines all sorts of animated disasters in the course of her day, Meryl (Justine Clarke) happens across an Adelaide tragedy on the way home from her father’s funeral: a man has been hit and killed by a slow-moving train. This event has a ripple effect on those who were there or worked the story, including photographer Nick (William McInnes), who’s just been diagnosed with testicular cancer, journalist Andy (Anthony Hayes), whose sometimes girl-friend has just announced her pregnancy, newspaper editor and apprehensive family man Phil (Andrew S. Gilbert), and a number of others.

A bravura ensemble drama that melds a Robert Altman/Paul Thomas Anderson multi-character criss-cross aesthetic to the dreamlike, contemplative otherworldliness of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, Look Both Ways is the triumphant live-action feature debut of animator Sarah Watt, expanded from her 2001 hand-drawn short Living with Happiness. We’re all but a moment away from disaster, Watt’s screenplay cautions, but human connections are still possible amidst the din of random tragedy; the burgeoning relationship between Meryl and Nick is a droll masterpiece of doom and gloom in the face of love.

Winner of the Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and the matching trifectas of film, director and screenplay prizes from both the Film Critics Circle of Australia and the Australian Film Institute, Look Both Ways—dedicated to “friends and family who’ve left us too soon”—is a breathtakingly assured treatise on the urgent importance of braving an unstable world each and every day. The DVD from Kino International is a fine way to get in on the ground floor of the nascent New Australian Cinema, which over the last two years has included such exciting and diverse offerings as Cate Shortland’s provocative Somersault, John Hillcoat’s gritty The Proposition, Rowan Woods’ intense Little Fish, Ray Lawrence’s mysterious Jindabyne and Greg McLean’s terrifying Wolf Creek.

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