Paris 1919, Armistice Day: The film opens with a decoupling of image and sound, frequent cross-cutting between a jubilant parade, a hospital for wounded soldiers and a church. The first we see of the parade is through the missing leg of a soldier, before it corrects to a more ceremonious high angle. A sermon for peace is intercut with incessant cannon fire, re-imagined by traumatized soldiers in the hospital, that belie the pastor’s futile words, vying against the serenity of the church bell, the loud cheers of the crowd, the military music.
At one point or another, each sound invades each image, disengaging the traditional harmony. Two quick dollies follow, one upward to the crucified Christ, one downward to the last remaining solider in the church, on whose face, his eventual confession we end. If more formally ambitious, speaking through contrasts only seen by the Vertovian Kino-Eye, in its underlying ideas Broken Lullaby is consistent with the anti-war films of the period. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 and Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front come to mind most immediately. How does Ernst Lubitsch, the same Lubitsch that made Smiling Lieutenant the prior and Trouble in Paradise the same year, enter this world? Insofar as we can identity this Lubitsch as a hedonist, however only a superficial difference distinguishes the troubles of the guilt-ridden French soldier to those of Gary Cooper (Trouble in Paradise), or Melvyn Douglas (Angel).
The French soldier in question is Paul Renard, a violinist, who killed a German soldier in battle, which prohibits him from moving on. In an act of repentance, he visits the family of the soldier (Walter) to confess to them, but is unable to, instead trapping himself in the lie of having been a friend, in the process slowly becoming him, the son the family had lost, the husband the fiancée (Elsa) was deprived of. “Less brilliant, more direct, more sincere,” Miguel Marias called it fittingly. It’s a story at once foreign to Lubitsch and very much him. Accordingly, his formal gaze sharpens, his mise-en-scène here defined less through excess than purpose. The illusions of the calm family dinner are broken through the simple asymmetry of the staged dinner table, missing its son so dearly.
Paul’s determination is overwhelmed upon contact with the hopeful eyes of the family, six diagonal lines piercing straight into him, the camera rotating from father to mother, neither of whose gaze he can reciprocate. The lie formed, dividing Paul even further from the world he was so desperate to reconcile with, at its most distinct during the moment he confesses to Elsa, the two in Walter’s room, sharply divided by the shadowed, triangulated edges of the walls; a tinge of expressionism from the man who’d often been so careful to avoid its temptations.
Paul’s emergence engenders a re-awakening in the father, who, hitherto remained resentful toward the French, a sentiment shared by the rest of the town and the entirety of 19/20th-century Germany. His newfound pacifism, his renunciation of German nationalism is predicated however on the lie of French-German solidarity (symbolized in Paul and Walter, who didn’t know each other, though they very well could have, given their interests) which, for all truth’s sake, mars it. It’s as if to properly move forward, a certain delusion is required, a lie that once revealed could lead to war anew, hence a lie that can’t be revealed, as Elsa admonishes Paul. The dissatisfactions of the town are packaged into generalized diatribes, into what into what Leland Poague calls the Pirandellian facades of Lubitsch’s characters, here the anti-French sentiment, the hatred and perpetuation of it over the past pain that prohibits an interaction with anything real.
The tragic irony is that the father speaks as if he’s aware of this, while speaking through yet another lens; through his early behavior, Lubitsch makes very clear that the father wouldn’t have forgiven Paul had he confessed during their first meeting. To transcend himself, he had to be lied to. Theodor Adorno, regarding the end of World War Two wrote extensively on this very issue: “The thought that after this war life could continue on “normally”, or indeed that culture could be “reconstructed” – as if the reconstruction of culture alone were not already the negation of such – is idiotic.” As such, the dialectic here is fully exposed, the need for normalcy, and its unattainability, as well as Lubitsch’s prescient glance toward the future of a fascistic Europe whose fatalistic specter haunts the ending.
All of this, while more grounded, hits deeply the core of Lubitsch’s Weltbild, which is always one of enjoyment, of the freedom to pursue. Representative of this is his wit, and the peculiar structuring of his scenes, here constantly endangering the harmony of Lubitsch’s world, like one scene of the weeping mothers by the graveyard, which build up toward a joke, but turn to tears during their climax. The possibility for re-emergence, for redemption isn’t buried, its glint remains, as we see during an extended scene which follows the townspeople eavesdropping on Paul and Elsa’s jaunt, eventually ending on one of the women in the window grabbing a pillow to secure comfortable viewing of the bourgeoning romance. Still, harmony, more so, freedom’s at stake; 1919, seen through the eyes of 1932, shows Europe at a crossroads.
This wouldn’t be the only time Lubitsch felt the need to express his worries. Though his other anti-war film To Be or Not to Be takes a different approach, adhering to his more recognizable mannerisms to lampoon the appearance-driven ontology of Nazism, the loss of pleasure and enjoyment is equally at peril, symbolized in the acting couple, and the wife who’s able to cheat on her husband only when he performs his soliloquies on stage, a logic to their relationship that must be restrained during the espionage moments.
What binds Walter and Paul is their love for music, both violinists who lose that privilege, the former through death, the latter confined to playing the violin of the man he killed, for the parents he deceived. It’s telling that in the final shot, Elsa—who joins Paul’s violin and plays the piano—and Paul disappear, their rendition only heard by the parents, who lean back and rejoice in their slumber, a complicated image for it contains its own negation: international solidarity redeeming itself through the transcendence of music, the perfectly harmonious image it returns it, sustained through the sacrifice of the future generation, who must bear the lie.
The image cuts to black, the music continuous, national differences disappear. Perhaps it required the lie as the ladder to discard upon climbing it. Lubitsch tried for the first time to be significant, “and failed,” was biographer Eyman Scott’s verdict, one shared by other critics including Pauline Kael, but even if it’s “less brilliant” as Marias called it, it’s Lubitsch’s clearest formulation of his own ideology precisely through its absence, and thereby helps clarify, and justify, the entirety of his work. The world of Trouble in Paradise is contingent on overcoming the world of Broken Lullaby.