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"A Woman Of Paris" is in some respects an ordinary, even mediocre film. In other respects it is startlingly original,
even visionary. In no other film is the paradox of Chaplin on more vivid display.
The film was obviously shot and edited with great care, without regard to showcasing Chaplin's own performance, so it
can serve as a good case in point to investigate Chaplin's abilities as a director. The results are mixed, in a baffling and
frustrating way.
The film is full of expressionistic lighting effects, some quite lovely, and there are also occasional shots that use
dynamic framing for emotional impact, but there is no coherent visual style overall. The "beauty shots" punctuate
longer sequences of flat lighting and composition, mostly in the interiors, like advertisements for Chaplin's artistic earnestness.
The editing is generally taut and effective, but not to a degree that can overcome the slow stretches in the second half of
the narrative.
What's miraculous about the film, what places it so far ahead of it time, is its tone. Those who feel that Lubitsch discovered
his "touch" through this film have a good case -- because the Lubitsch style is here in a primitive form, and it
must have seemed revolutionary to filmmakers of the time.
The story of the film is standard melodrama -- a good girl falls, has fun on the descent, then pays a terrible price for
her choice and repents. Victorian morality is built into the tale, but from the very first title card Chaplin announces that
he's not going to tell it judgmentally, but with charity towards all the characters, including the cad who leads the good
girl astray. The effect is a radical reinvention of melodrama -- pointing the way to the codified studio strategies of the
sound era, where stories with conventional moral resolutions manage in the telling of them to subvert, or at least challenge,
the morality endorsed. The classic example of this is the woman's film of the Thirties and Forties, where the bold independence
displayed by female characters is not quite vitiated by their submission to a man in the end.
What's really radical about Chaplin's approach, however, is the freedom it gave him to establish a new tone for the storytelling
-- this film has a casual, understated, sometimes even lighthearted feel, in which casual bits of comic visual business are
not out of place. There's a calculated delicacy in this one might not expect from a great slapstick clown, but Chaplin's touch,
like Lubitsch's later, is very sure.
The tone is particularly evident in the acting. Menjou and Purviance give easy, nuanced, understated performances which
are nevertheless full of life and charm. One might have wished, if only for the sake of her career, that Purviance had been
given a few more opportunities to demonstrate some real energy. This is not the sort of performance that really excites audiences
-- but it's wonderful all the same.
Here is melodrama, then, relieved of bombast and moral caricature, capable of subtlety, of wit, of wry comedy, of a wide
range of tones and a complex treatment of moral character. That adds up, in a general sense, to the future of Hollywood melodrama
as a whole, and opens a path for the magical sensibility of Lubitsch at his peak.
There may be precedents for Chaplin's reimagining of melodrama, but that hardly matters. The fact that Chaplin made such
a film, and showed that it could work, in aesthetic if not commercial terms, must have inspired filmmakers to a degree that's
hard to fully appreciate in retrospect. It was a window flung open on the future.
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