This is a movie that requires several viewings to appreciate. It has a sort of hypnotic charm and oddness about it that I found gripped my attention throughout, even when I wasn't exactly sure I was understanding the message.
Ivan Mosjoukine plays the famous Detective Z who is hired by a husband to investigate his wife and persuade her to leave Paris and move with him to South America. The plot is superficially a standard detective story, but it has so many bizarre twists it ends up defying categorization. Mosjoukine shows his great talent for comedy in this film, and has a playfulness and charm that are really adorable. He's such a little boy, dissolving in tears when his heart is broken, and then bouncing with delight when all ends well.
There's one scene in this movie that's too difficult to describe, but it's a sort of crazed women's dance marathon, and the way it ends - with the women turning the tables and making the men all dance frenetically together - is so funny, it made me laugh out loud in a way no other silent movie has ever done. The sets have an overpowering, surreal effect - the human beings are always moving about in rooms and on staircases that are far bigger than anything a normal person would experience. The scene where the husband blunders into the detective agency, and is confronted by a synchronized line of tuxedoed detectives on traveling chairs that slide about in formation, is quite unforgettable. It's like a cross between a Fred Astaire dance number and a Kafka nightmare. The ending has a twist I never saw coming, and probably was a big reason why the movie failed at the box office. It's a happy ending, but just bizarre - even in France, I can't imagine an audience in 1923 thinking that this was a believable way to end a quasi-mystery, no matter how well Mosjoukine prepared them in advance with all the surrealist details. I'd really like to see this movie completely restored; it is visually exciting, and deserves a wider audience. Come to think of it, the time may be right for someone even to remake it - it's quite outside of any real time period, and would not come across as dated at all.
