BLONDE VENUS ***1/2
IDEA: A former entertainer from Germany returns to show business after immigrating to the US, in order to raise money to send her ailing husband abroad for medical treatment.
BLURB: Across the robust portfolio of characters she authored in the films of Josef von Sternberg - all arguably among the most variegated, fascinating, subversive female roles in early Hollywood cinema - Helen Faraday stands out as perhaps Dietrich’s most complex. This nominal Venus is less a vamp or a romantic lover than an iridescent, nearly cubist embodiment of a myriad conceptions of femininity, ones that both stem from and upend patriarchal gender dualisms. She first appears swimming nude in a wooded watering hole, a shimmering earthly sign of the eternal feminine. Then, Sternberg makes an ingeniously disorienting transition to another nude bathing body, this time of her young son in the near future, establishing the primal bond that will define Helen as Mother - the only in the Dietrich/Sternberg catalog. One consequently expects Blonde Venus to settle into a familiar mold of women’s melodrama, to reinscribe the role of the sacrificial mother in the schema of the heterosexual nuclear family. But Sternberg is not one to play by the books. Instead, Helen jinks in tandem with the mercurial, sometimes haphazard-feeling, and proudly unbelievable script, pin-balling between maternal domesticity and promiscuous showbiz spectacle, vanquishing the distance between devoted mother/wife and fallen woman. Maybe the most radical aspect of Blonde Venus is the odd, shifting psychosexual triangle made of Helen and her husband and child, which mixes obviously Oedipal dynamics with a rejection of same, resulting in an anti-phallic structure that almost entirely removes Herbert Marshall’s passive father from the picture. The power, after all, resides in Helen, in Dietrich’s enigmatic and inexhaustible mutability, in a woman who defies the expectations and categories of a male-authored world.
No comments:
Post a Comment