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A young Frenchwoman (Edith Jehanne) weathers the Russian Revolution, the shooting of her father in the Crimea by Bolsheviks (among them her lover Uno Henning), and a desperate escape to Paris, where she seeks work at her eccentric uncle's detective agency. Her heart soars when her lover (he didn't actually,
personally kill her father) comes to France to organize the sailors of Toulon. But he and she are soon caught up in feverish subplots involving a slimy Russian expatriate (the amazingly ratlike Fritz Rasp); a blond, blind girl pure of heart but dim of brain (
Metropolis's Birgitte Helm); a missing diamond (case solved in a manner that must be seen to be disbelieved); and the same diamond going missing again--after a memorably grotesque murder.
No, the plot of The Love of Jeanne Ney doesn't bear scrutiny, but that only frees you to scrutinize G.W. Pabst's images instead. The director planned every shot with great particularity, composing the film on the principle of constant motion--of the actors and the action, but also the camera, which nervously seeks out visible clues to the characters' inner states (a previous Pabst film had been titled Secrets of a Soul). Pabst was fundamentally a realist, unlike his rivals Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau; consequently, his movies don't look nearly as "Germanic" as theirs--and except for his legendary collaborations with Louise Brooks, Pandora's Box (1929) and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), they haven't been seen much. Jeanne Ney marks a good opportunity to start reversing this neglect. --Richard T. Jameson
Synopsis
Before plunging headlong into the Freudian sexuality of Pandora's Box, German filmmaker G. W. Pabst offered the impressionistic social document Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney). Based on a sturm-und-drang story by Ilya Ehrenberg, the film travels from the Crimea to Paris and back again in unfolding a sprawling tale of sociological upheaval. The events are seen through the eyes of Jeanne Ney (Edith Hehanne), who is forced to flee her Russian homeland when her Communist lover kills her diplomat father. The romance between Jeanne and her politicized paramour irrevocably links the lure of radicalism with the call of the flesh. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
