London Film Festival 2012: The Loves of Pharoah

rating: 2.5

Ernst Lubitsch's The Loves of Pharoah, long thought lost beyond presentation, has been painstakingly reconstituted, with the 600 missing meters of film (out of 2976m, roughly 20% of the product) being replaced by captions and images, a sure testament to the power of the modern restorative process even if Lubitsch's product itself is not wholly engaging. A daft epic of sorts, war breaks out between Egypt and Ethiopia, with a Greek slave girl, Theonis, becoming caught in the middle, the apparent prize of a love triangle which underscores the entire picture. It's an experience to come to with less expectation about the narrative and more the process which has brought the film to our screens; the descriptive captions detailing missing shots doesn't prove as intrusive as one might expect, and there is only one lengthy portion throughout the film that has been entirely built from nothing; the majority of the missing footage consists of interspersed shots. That said, the choice to make the inter-titles blue-on-black rather than white-on-black is a strange one; why draw our attention to this any more than is necessary? Still, the film features several jarring colour tints - of green and red - to evoke mood, as long as disarming pinhole camera techniques, so it's hardly an ordinary silent film by any stretch anyway. What does impress outside of its meticulous delivery system is the quality of the sets - particularly a giant stone block used to crush dissenters - and the scale of the production, notably during a downhill fight between armies, featuring thousands of extras who no doubt would be generated by digital wizardry these days. Furthermore, the stirring score might feel like something built from scratch for this restoration, yet astoundingly, it is in fact Eduard Künneke's original composition for the film, which proves much more memorable than the film itself. A few technical tricks - notably a trippy perspective dupe as a young boy walks up some steps to approach the Pharoah - prove impressive for the period, even if they ultimately feel wasted on such ropey material. Naturally, the stagey goofiness of most all silent films is here in spades - as so brilliantly sent up in last year's The Artist - but that's essentially par the course, even if the narrative - amounting to a daft fight over a woman - is less excusable. When the characters finally arrive at the conclusion we most likely did over an hour ago, it's sure to initiate a slow clap - well, a mental one, at least. The climax does feature one impressive moment in which an actor - evidently not a stunt-man - is placed in harm's way, but it's regrettable that, despite the best efforts of this restoration, the most jubilant moment of all can be observed only through a single image, and the moving equivalent is, of course, unfortunately lost forever. More a testament to the fastidiousness of film restoration than Lubitsch's narrative, The Loves of Pharoah is strictly for the curious cinephile.