Champagne Katya... The Girl in Tails (1926), Stephen Horne and Elizabeth Jane-Baldry, Bonn Silent Film Festival

I’m to be disgraced simply because I’m a girl. A meek and mild, simple and unassuming girl…

 

Warm glow… this is such an uplifting film, a delicate mixture of comedy and drama that fully lives up to its promise as A Light Summer Film Story especially with truly delicious accompaniment from Horne and Baldry, without whom no remote access Bonn would be complete. It is notable for addressing so many issues that might be considered more modern concerns and it tackles proto feminism in ways which are never black and white, flowing naturally with the story. It’s sophisticated about its subject and uses cross-dressing as a means of creating conflict as well as comedy and makes points about fairness that doesn’t bang the drum so much as rolls it around the ballroom between social conservatism and the heroine’s “fight against injustice”.

 

This restraint is ostensibly surprising as the film, Flickan I Frack in Swedish, is directed by Karin Swanström who also plays the terrifying matriarch, “the undisputed monarch” of the small-town society of Wadköping, Widow Hyltenius, but that’s acting for you. She was one of the few women directing film in Sweden in this period – or anywhere else by this stage – and is clearly responsible for the emotional intelligence that raises the film above broader comedy and simplistic melodrama.  The characters are fulsome and nuanced and there is a very satisfying pace to the story throughout; it’s coherent and never forgets to entertain.

 

Who knows what conversations it started in contemporary Sweden but the debate is still ongoing in certain aspects of equality…

Magda Holm

There are many good performers in the film but everything revolves around the outstanding verve of Magda Holm as Katja Kock. Holm featured in several Swedish films during the silent period and was also a top-class sailor, with the nickname” Bimbi”, which was also the name of one of her dogs. Both Bimbi’s feature in a nautical interlude in which the hound’s mistress falls into a lake, swimming to shore with all the assurance you’d expect. But, far more impressive in this context, is Maga’s acting ability and she performs as well as she freestyles.

 

The tonality of the film turns of Holm’s expressiveness and her ability to flick from the dramatic to the tongue in cheek without ever the giving the game away. She has so much of the camera’s attention and rises magnificently to the challenge every time – what a team with Swanström!

 

Holm plays Katja the eldest child of Karl Kock (Nils Aréhn) the town’s unsung genius not only down on his luck with unwelcomed inventions, but also being defrauded by his accountant Björner (Gösta Gustafson).

 

Einar Axelsson

Katja is the smart one in the family with brother Curry (Erik Zetterström) being “Wadköping’s only, or at least, most perfect, snob” and the favoured sibling, his father’s investment matched only by his sister’s endless patience and generosity. They both attend the town’s co-educational school where Magda’s pal Count Ludwig von Battwhyl (Einar Axelsson), is on course to fail all his exams. Magda decides that he can still be saved if he studies with her help for a solid month although the Counts get up and go has got up and gone and his main interest is in his new tutor…

Axelsson is also a delight in this film with a world-weary energy informing Count Ludwig with a cheerful listless charm; he’s a decent chap though just saddled with the burden of his position even though he will prove to be steadfast when the going gets reactionary.

 

How can the world see how pretty you are when you dress like a washerwoman?

 

Ludwig chides Katya for her dowdiness and she agrees so, when the Count arranges a ball to celebrate the end of term, she asks her father for funds to buy a dress to impress. Father is not unsympathetic but he’s broke and decides against this investment even though he has long splashed out on Curry’s living beyond their collective means. This, patently, is unfair… but Katya is determined and she will go to the ball!

 

Anna-Lisa Baude-Hansen and pals

 

The Count is heir to the Larsbo estate, 20 kilometres south of Wadköping and where his cigar-chomping Aunt Lotten Brenner (Anna-Lisa Baude-Hansen), university lecturer in comparative anatomy, leads The Wilde Hoard of Learned Ladies a group of bluer-than-blue stockings who do as they will. It’s a great group and I’d love to know more about this lot, a mix of future-thinkers and privileged political thought who, as with everything in the film, Swanström paints evenly with hints of intellectual snobbery mixed in with their liberalism.

 

Against this is not only Widow Hyltenius and her Council of Mothers but also the traditions of the school as embodied in Rector Starck (Georg Blomstedt) and yet the latter shows more understanding when the ball arrives and Katya makes her grand entrance in her brother tails. The ball sequence is so well developed, at first showing the town’s social structure in miniature with the Widow and her Mothers overlooking the dancers and then the absolute shock when Katya arrives in male clothing – the reaction shots are a hoot but the whole room visibly pulls away from this “unnatural” apparition leaving her confidence draining.

 

The belle of the ball.

Starck intervenes and turns everything on its head, seeing only a “damsel in distress” and turning the Mothers’ prudishness around by pointing out how sober Katya’s clothing is in comparison to distasteful modern décolletage – on awkward display in a number of the group. The tide turns and the young men queue to dance with Katya but disaster strikes when her drink is spiked by creepy Björner and she enjoys herself rather too much.

 

Ludwig sees only one route froward from now, they must leave to become missionaries in the Congo but with Katya now disowned and the town’s elders attacking her in the local newspaper with a series of articles on modern youth… she finds refuge with The Wilde Hoard of Learned Ladies at Larsbo…

 

And that’s barely the half of it; can young and old, father and daughter, vindictive and forgiving be brought together. The conclusion is as easy going and narratively uncompromised as the rest of the film, an absolute belter!

Karin Swanström and Georg Blomstedt

 All of this was of course enlivened by the piano, flute and accordion of Stephen Horne and the harp of Elizabeth-Jane Baldry. The two work so well together leaving each other space and supporting as they share the leading lines with the harp being used as percussion and bass as well as the heavenly flourishes you’d expect. There we some exceptionally lovely themes and the improvised was hard to separate from the pre-arranged which says it all. The ideal accompaniment for this uplifting film!

 

As if by magic, the date of the film’s climactic moment is Thursday 12^th August, the day before Friday 13^th August and… the Bonn organisers chose this film to be the first streamed last Thursday, 12^th August. 

 

The link to the full schedule, screenings and, most crucially, donations is right here. Please help to support this festival and, hopefully, see you there next year.