There’s a naive impulse in modern audiences to look back to the early, silent days of cinema as harmless & quaint. Something about the stage-bound sets, for-the-back-rows vaudevillian performances, and hand-cranked camera speeds leads people to dismiss the early decades of cinema as being out of date to the point of total irrelevance. When you actually watch those movies in full, however, you’ll find they often deal in spectacle, politics, and humor with the same sharpness as any modern work (the good ones, anyway). For instance, one of the better Hollywood studio pictures of the year so far is the technophobic horror romcom Companion, starring Sophie Thatcher as an AI sexbot who’s unaware that she’s not a fully autonomous human being. Her artificiality is a major point of attraction for the tech-bro incel who purchased her (for selfish schemes not worth fully outlining here), raising questions about how the misogynist radicalization of young men has corrupted modern gender dynamics to the point where true, genuine love is a cultural impossibility. The political arguments & technological details of that premise may sound like they could only belong to a movie from the 2020s, but they’re also present in Ernst Lubitsch’s silent comedy The Doll, made in Germany over a century ago.

In The Doll, a pampered young man is pressured by his dying baron uncle to get married, so that he can properly claim his noble inheritance. The fop responds to this request with revulsion, as he is both afraid & spiteful of women. After being chased around his little German village—Scooby-Doo style—by every marriageable maiden in shouting distance, he finds sanctuary among monks in a local monastery, where finds the comforts of things he loves almost as much as he loathes women: meat, beer, and men. While in hiding he is handed an advertisement for a mad-scientist dollmaker (named Hilarius) who makes lifelike automatons resembling flesh-and-blood women, marketed to “bachelors, widows, and misogynists.” He answers the ad in a scheme to pass off the automaton as his fiancée and fool his uncle so that he doesn’t have to interact with any actual women. Things immediately go awry when the doll is broken before purchase and replaced with the dollmaker’s anarchically bratty daughter, who’s more prone to misbehave than any of the maidens he was in danger of marrying in the first place. As the dandy misogynist attempts to treat his new, control-operated bride like a piece of furniture, she finds ways to undermine his caddish behavior and stand up for herself as a fellow human being, with her own needs & desires, all while keeping up the ruse that she’s a wind-up doll.

It would be foolish to assume that Lubitsch was somehow unaware of the political or sexual implications in this antique relic, which is just as much of a high-style gender warfare comedy as Companion. True to the sex-positive mayhem of the more famous farces he’d later make in Hollywood (Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, To Be Or Not to Be, etc.), The Doll‘s human-posing-as-an-automaton conceit leads to a myriad of sex gags in which “the doll” is placed in men’s intimate spaces within the monastery where no proper woman would ever be allowed unsupervised. The comedian playing that doll, Ossi Oswalda, also starred in a Lubitsch picture the previous year titled I Don’t Want to be a Man! that features her in drag, drunkenly making out with a fellow man at an all-night ball in some proto-Victor/Victoria genderfuckery. In both cases, it’s clear to me that sneaking those sex jokes past moralistic censorship was Lubitsch’s primary goal, but he justified those jokes by couching them in the general political gender commentary that afford the films their social value (beyond just being funny). In I Don’t Want to be a Man, that commentary is mostly about how men’s societal privileges come with their own set of stressful societal pressures, while The Doll is about those privileged men’s bone-deep misogyny — identifying it as a rightful target for mockery.

I’m used to Lubitsch’s comedies being sexually & politically pointed in this way, but I’m not used to them being as outright fantastical as The Doll. He’s practically doing a George Méliès impersonation here, leaning into the illusionary magic of early, inventive cinema with color-tinted frames and hand-built fantasy sets. The very first scene features Lubitsch himself constructing a dollhouse set for the audience’s entertainment, which he then populates with two inanimate dolls. From there, we’re immersed inside that artificial dollhouse world, with the dolls from the opening replaced by real-life human actors. Cardboard cutouts of the sun, the moon, trees, and clouds decorate the backdrops of every exterior scene with hand-illustrated detail. Horses are never actually horses; they’re humans in a shared costume, complete with the tacked-on tail of a stuffed animal. This artificiality is wonderfully carried over to Oswalda’s performance as the non-automaton feminist, as she moves in jerky, robotic obedience whenever her husband is looking but immediately switches to wild, animalistic behavior whenever on her own. It’s a gorgeous, imaginative work of visual art that’s been echoed in modern films from directors like Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, and—in the case of Beau is Afraid—Ari Aster. Once you look past the technical markers of its era, there’s nothing outdated or quaint about it.

-Brandon Ledet