Obscured desire. The Woman and the Puppet (1929), with Günter A. Buchwald, Bonn Silent Film Festival 2024

My sweet, can’t you just be satisfied with everything I’ve already given you? … my entire body is yours to hold and caress… Isn’t it enough, all that? In that case, perhaps it’s not me that you love, but only what I refuse to let you have?

Pierre Louÿs, La femme et le pantin (1898)

 

Every so often a silent film not only surprises you but pulls you to the edge of your armchair and has you blinking at the screen in delight. So, it is with the story and the actress in La femme et le pantin (1929) in which Conchita Montenegro’s dancer not only beguiles and bewilders her puppet, Don Mateo, she completely un-mans him in the most feminist of ways reaching right out from 1929 with dazzling power and beauty. If anyone has a thousand ships that need launching… here’s your woman!

 

Based on Pierre Louÿs’ 1898 novel of the same name, the story was adapted as an opera in 1911 by composer Riccardo Zandonai, before its first film version in 1920, an American film directed by Reginald Barker and starring Geraldine Farrar – which it’s hard to imagine having the same force as this version directed by Jacques de Baroncelli. The story is also a familiar one as it was also filmed as That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet obscur objet du désir) (1977) by Luis Buñuel but… imagine some of that director’s intentions and frankness being on display half a century before? de Baroncelli is that bold as, indeed, is his star performer and, looking up on Louÿs’ background of erotic prose and poetry, the man to whom Oscar Wilde dedicated the original French publication of Salome, and who signed a copy of Dorian Grey* to thank him for his revision of the book's manuscript… it’s difficult to see anything like a literal adaptation being made anywhere else but France at this time.

 

Tristan Sévère

The film transgresses in so many ways, not least the obvious ones with Montenegro dancing in the nude, with nothing left to the imagination save for that which her syncopated physicality implies, which, for a seventeen-year-old, comes with an extra layer of “obscurity” for modern audiences even if perhaps less so at the time? That said, the man she entrances is described as an ageing aristocrat here played by Tristan Sévère who was only 25 but greyed up, with Don Mateo being 37 in the book whilst Conchita is just 15.

 

Where The Woman and the Puppet really differentiates it’s risk-taking is in giving Conchita almost complete agency and not simply in a vampy way – no evil Theda here – but with a character who knows the measure of her man and who isn’t toying with him she is stress-testing his love to destruction if required. This is not so much in revenge for his daring to acquire her but a genuine mission to establish the truth of their relationship or at least that’s the way it seemed to me on a single viewing.

 

The film begins with an image of four female dancers bouncing a male puppet up and down on a blanket stretched between them. This is taken from a painting by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Straw Maniken, (1791–92) which is, now as then, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid and which, in the book, Don Mateo refers to while lamenting how Concha treats him. Here it is re-enacted with Conchita holding one edge and Don Mateo twisted in flaccid rage just as the puppet… he can’t live with her and he can’t live without. He wants the one he can’t have, and it’s driving him mad as Stephen Morrisey sang sometime later.

 

 Don Mateo being all manly

This madness begins, as does so much, on a train journey and there’s a magnificent shot of a steam train set against the alpine snow on which we find the jaded Don Mateo “notorious throughout Spain for his fortune and his female conquests”. Accompanied by his friend André Stinvenol (Henri Lévêque) he goes to watch the Spanish dancers in third class where he interrupts a fight between an older woman played by Andrée Canti with whom I would not mess and a ferocious yet out-matched Conchita Perez, who is afraid of no one and, after laughing at her opponents dancing, mocked her still further with her own dance.

 

I kissed you because I liked you but you can’t kiss me without loving me!

 

Don Mateo is captivated for all the humdrum reasons men usually are – and my Gen Z daughter was pretty frank on this point viewing the film… but their moment ends on the train. Months later at a lavish party in his villa, Conchita makes her way in to say hello and to tell him where she lives in Calle Monteros with her mother. Don Mateo duly goes to visit only to be befuddled by Concha’s pulling away when he tries to take her affection for granted. Nevertheless she invites him back and he is soon “madly in love” with this very young woman who is so far below his social class and yet exerts such power.

 

Don Mateo tells her mother that he wants to make Concha “part of his life” and the young woman having seen him hand over a sum of money, then flies into a rage with both parent and paramour; “I longed to give myself to you. You wanted to buy me.” As Paola Cristalli, quoted in the programme notes, observed in 2020: “There is always something that stands between Don Mateo’s gaze and the object of his attraction…” but it is also his own failure to truly understand her and his inability to communicate. It is incapacity to trust and, knowing him a jealous man, Conchita uses a friend’s lover to push and test still further.

 

Even when Don Mateo finally cracks and resorts to the violence we always expected, she makes him pay in her own time even after telling him it is a sign of his true affection. It’s not, he is reduced by the aggression and shows that the kind of love she needs is beyond him on the basest of human levels.

 

If this makes the film sound frustrating it is anything but with good performances from the support and this amazing central display of nuanced force from Montenegro. Is the nude rude as Nell Shipman’s self-promotion asked a decade before? It’s gratuitous of course, but it does show that Concha has some level of control even when she makes this decision – the men watching her are diminished and, of course, Don Mateo falls short yet again in his response. A complex and unexpectedly challenging film that reminds us once again to never under-estimate the makers of these films.

 

For the live screening Günter A. Buchwald on piano and violin was accompanied by Frank Bockius on percussion but the live stream had Günter’s magnificent new score played by himself and orchestra. I really hope there’s another chance to view and here this in the UK or Italy. Restored in 2020, it’s one of the standout discoveries – for me – of the last few years.

 

Conchita Montenegro abides...

*Recently sold at Christies, details here!

 

**PaolaCristalli’s notes for an August 2020 screening in Bologna.

 

Goya's Puppet