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Rating: The Doll (Die Puppe) is a 1919 film by Ernst Lubitsch.
The stupid Italian translation might suggest that it's a film, like I don't know... erotic?
Couldn't they just call it THE DOLL?
Anyway, enough chit-chat. Die Puppe is a silent film, a comedic film, and it's superb.
I am more and more convinced, as I watch his films, that Ernst Lubitsch is the absolute number one in the field of the "comedy" genre, and only God knows how reductive an adjective is in this case.
What strikes me is not so much the execution, Lubitsch wasn't a perfectionist. Lubitsch had "ideas."
In this film, for example, he chooses to use a papier-mâché set! Cardboard clouds, the sun as well, and the carriage with horses? They are human beings dressed as horses who, when on break, sit with their butts on the ground... The beauty is that it all fits, meaning you don’t say, "what nonsense," you say FANTASTIC!!
There's this young man who is the nephew of a very rich uncle. The uncle isn’t in great health and wishes more than anything else that his nephew finds a wife... but the young man is utterly terrified of the fair sex and won’t hear of it... rather than getting married, he comes up with an unlikely scheme: to marry a doll, an android with human-like features that really seem like a flesh-and-blood girl but is still a doll, with controls on its back and needs to be wound up and dusted, and watch out!... it’s just been painted.
An unforeseen event occurs and... and nothing. You laugh from start to finish within a wonderful, magical world. The world of Lubitsch. And you even discover that good old FANTOZZI just COPIED a couple of ideas from him and well...
Genius, creativity, poetry, lightness, magic.
Above all, magic.
The magic of CINEMA.
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