Michael (Masters of Cinema) DVD | Movie Mail UK | DVDs and Blu-ray films direct

Star Review

Beautifully presented in two restored versions and with an informative 20-page booklet, Dreyer’s Michael marks its 80th birthday with its first release on home video, and also includes a significant extra in a half-hour audio interview with Carl Dreyer recorded in 1965. The film itself recreates the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle opulence in a respected artist’s studio in which the painter watches helpless as his young model Michael moves away from his own attentions and into the arms of a penniless Princess. There is a subtle and intimate eroticism at play in a number of its scenes and its assured presentation of the atmosphere of unspoken love is masterful. Taking the form of a ‘kammerspiel’ or chamber drama, in which overt stylization is relinquished in favour of a concentration on the psychology of a few characters in intimate surroundings, in Michael these surroundings are all but suffocating with the opulent furnishings of the period making the characters’ loneliness all the more affecting.

It is a remarkable film for its sympathetic presentation of homosexual love. Not that this made any difference to its early showings in the USA where, although its original title The Inverts was dropped after protests from the censors, it was shown uncredited as Chained: A Story of the Third Sex and presented in a dubious cinema along with a ‘scientific lecture’.

Its examination of the requirements of true and great love foreshadows Dreyer’s final film Gertrud by forty years and provides a welcome companion piece. Photographed by Karl Freund and Rudolph Maté, the film also features Karl Freund’s only appearance in front of the camera as an art dealer.

Graeme Hobbs on 4th October 2004

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