The Dumb Girl of Portici

The Dumb Girl of Portici (2016) is the kind of silent film that meets all expectations of people that don't like silent films.  The acting is ludicrously melodramatic -- it makes grand opera look tame and restrained.  The action and plot are unabashedly histrionic, involving massacres, rapes, floggings, and madness.  The mise-en-scene is a weird mixture of shrewd ingenuity and technical blunders.  This is the kind of movie in which male characters are forever unsheathing their daggers and, then, clutching at their hearts while the heroine literally flits from place to place.  Lois Weber directed and the film is constructed on the grandest of all scales -- there are immense castles, a Neapolitan city extending to vast fortified gates, palaces and royal buildings with rotundas like the capitol, a humble village of fisher-folk living on the edge of a tumultuous sea with the high mountains overlooking Malibu in the background.  The set design is opulent -- the royal palace contains mythological frescos and tapestries and there are innumerable extras in armor marching around with halberds, herds of horses, and, in one late scarlet-tinted scene, a midnight bonfire with about 20 heads on pikes posted around it.  Unfortunately, all this sound and fury doesn't amount to much of anything -- it's a little like the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre story from Intolerance but without the interpolation of the other parallel narratives.  References to opera are justified:  the film is, in fact, an adaptation of a long-forgotten opera, Daniel Auber's La Muette de Portici, an 1828 production that, in fact, apparently triggered a revolution when it was performed in Belgium:  the opera is, if anything, more excessive than the film:  the climax of the opera involves revolutionary fighting while Mount Vesuvius erupts. 

Critics in search of a new figure to admire are, sometimes, forced to re-evaluate artists whose contributions to the art have been overlooked or denigrated.  In Hollywood's early days, film making was regarded more as a craft than a discipline like the theater -- early films had to be laboriously developed, hand-tinted, and, then, methodically cut together.  It seems that, on some level, these techniques had more to do with being a seamstress than a theater director and, so, it is interesting to note that the industry was initially heavily populated by bright, aggressive, and hard-working women.  Lois Weber was the foremost of these early female directors who have been largely ignored and forgotten.  (In Kevin Brownlow's magisterial work on the silent cinema, The Parade's Gone by, there are chapters devoted to Griffith and, even, directors like Allan Dwan, but, as I recall, little or nothing about Lois Weber.)  Weber was a foremost director in Hollywood before America's intervention in World War One, fully the peer of Griffith and better,  I think, than someone like Thomas Ince.  Like Griffith, her old-fashioned and hypocritically moralizing style (denouncing vice while luxuriating in it) didn't translate well into the Roaring Twenties and her film company failed.  The Dumb Girl of Portici, probably, represents the apogee of her influence -- it's very different from her later domestic comedies and message-films about birth control and prostitution.  The film's plot involves the so-called "dumb girl", a mute named Fenella.  She is played by the great ballet dancer, Anna Pavlova, and the film's chief interest today, I think, is that it preserves for us the appearance and acting style of that prima donna:  she can't act to save her soul but her bizarre appearance and her peculiarly boneless gestures and deportment are absolutely riveting. The mute girl lives in fisherman's village much oppressed by Spanish nobility living in Naples.  Fenella's brother, Masaniello is revolutionary firebrand.  The tyrant in Naples, called the Viceroy, has two sons:  Alphonso and Conde.  Alphonso falls in love with Fenella and spends the night with her.  When word of this liaison reaches the Viceroy, he sends out Conde to kidnap Fenella -- she has to be eliminated since Alphonso is promised to another, a Spanish noblewoman.  Fenella is thrown into a dank prison cell with horrific-looking stains on the wall and floor and a lot of friendly rats (with whom she makes friends).  After a rather desultory flogging and an attempted rape by a fellow prisoner, Fenella takes advantage of the guard's drunkenness and the general porosity of the prison to escape.  She runs across the landscape and ends up intercepting Alphonso who is on his way in regal procession to church to get married to his royal Spanish fiancée.  Fenella's bedraggled appearance, with her back still showing marks of the lash, disconcerts the wedding party.  Then, the Viceroy makes a big mistake -- here's the intertitle:  The Viceroy foolishly celebrated the Day by taxing fruit, the fare on which the lower classes chiefly lived.  This fruit tax leads to a popular rebellion -- this revolution, staged on a grandiose scale, occupies the last half of the two hour film.  Fenella somehow gets entrapped in the royal palace that is beleaguered by hundreds of peasants with battering rams.  In the end, the rebels sack the place and, apparently, take power.  Fenella's brother, Masaniello, becomes the ruler.  Unfortunately, a bad guy gives him the well-known potion of madness.   In the middle of signing decrees, he goes mad and ends  up killing himself.  Fenella gets stabbed.  In the final scene, we see her ballet-dancing her way up into heaven over a blurry backdrop of clouds coruscating with a molten sunset.  The story is replete with dance sequences.  Alphonso, on a tour of the fisher-folk's shanties, sees Fenella dancing on the shore of the sea and conceives his love for her -- in the opening scene she does a little pas de deux with strands of sea-weed.  In fact, in the first shot in the film, we see a poetic image of tall marshes standing around a pool at sunset -- Fenella is superimposed on this image which gradually fades to black and wearing a white tutu (and en pointe) she treats us to an extravagant dance:  a weird, almost eerie, fantasia on classical ballet.  Pavlova is not, by any stretch of the imagination, attractive -- but she is certainly compelling.  She is skeletal with fierce, glaring eyes that seem too large for her rather narrow face and she has a rabbit-like (or rat-like) overbite -- we can always see her teeth protruding from between her narrow lips.  She is both a bit equine and haggard, ghoulish-looking, with ice-white skin.  Her grimacing and flitting around epitomizes the film's acting style which is insanely melodramatic -- the movie seems,in fact, surreal:  everyone is always clutching at their heart to show resolve or wringing their hands or snarling or leering or grimacing in ecstasy or rage.  An example is one scene in which the Viceroy's two sons swear an oath, eyes rolling and hands clutched together while the other fist beats on the breast and, in lower corner of the image, their mother sneers and shows her teeth like a hyena -- I can't recall what any of this emoting was for, but the sheer surrealistic spectacle of this perpetual over-acting is overwhelming and, even, a little nightmarish.  Then, there is the problem of the identical actors:  for some reason, Weber casts four men who are the same general height and build, puts them in shaggy fright wigs, gives them identical goatees and sideburns and releases them into the world -- there is no way to tell the men apart except by their clothing (and, even, that is not a reliable indicator):  two of the men are Masaniello (who can be identified for part of the move by his short short shorts and bare thighs often smeared with blood during the fighting scenes) and his side-kick who looks exactly like him:  Alphonso and Conde are conceived as identical twins apparently.  The problem is that as the plot proceeds there is simply no way to tell who is doing what -- four of male protagonists all look exactly alike.  Pavlova doesn't look like anyone living, but the other women all seem to be the same exact age -- this is inconvenient since they are mother and daughter:  I could only tell the women apart by their elaborate headdresses.  The muteness of the title character doesn't play any part in the plot at all as far as I can see.  (Compare to Griffith's similar Orphans of the Storm in which of the Gish sisters -- I forget which -- is blind; her blindness is integral to the plot.)  There are some extremely impressive battle scenes, including some with exciting tracking shots, very innovative and brilliantly choreographed for 1916 -- but Weber doesn't understand the 180 degree rule and often cuts to reverse shots that are confusing.  For instance, in the big siege of the palace, we can't tell if we are on the outside trying to ram our way into the building or inside trying to defend against the rebels.  There are sequences that don't fit into the plot at all -- in one of the battle scene, we see a title called :  "The Soldier's Revenge".  Then, there is a shot of a armored officer stealing some gems.  He finds a secret panel in the wall and enters a dark cabinet.  But before he can escape, another armored man fires his pistol right into the camera lens and there is cut to the officer seizing his chest, dropping his booty, and falling over.  But this little anecdotal sequence, maybe forty seconds long, has nothing to do with anything else in the movie.  Some of the titles are idiotic to the point of being surrealistically amusing:  Masaniello sacrificing everything to search for his sister soon got behind with dues on his hut.  The camera work is brilliant -- extremely deep focus and immensely expressive.  There are some chiaroscuro shots of Pavlova that exploit her narrow sinewy body to make her look almost like a nude by Rodin or an emaciated Pieta.  The film's politics are extremely confusing -- everything leads to the righteous explosion of the rebellion against the Spanish.  But once the rebellion occurs anarchy results and the film maker decries the involvement of "thieves and murderers" whom we see literally emerging from caves and cisterns in the revolution.  Weber is an interesting director, but she is leagues behind D. W. Griffith.