Cluny Brown (1946)

 Ernst Lubitsch’s “Cluny Brown”

Thematic Elements: 

Ernst Lubitsch’s final completed film, “Cluny Brown” is a film about being stuck. Stuck in a way of life, stuck in a stagnant society, stuck in a structured hierarchy, and plenty of things stuck in the sink drains. The film tells the story of Cluny, a wannabe plumber whose dream is to own a giant house with many pipes for her to ‘unclog.’ This desire to unclog something that is stuck seems to be a through line throughout the entire film, in many different aspects. Cluny is a woman who has a sense of sexual liberation and adventure; however, she is trapped by her circumstances. She is trapped in a world in which women cannot express themselves sexually and are taught to know their place. This very thing gets told to Cluny by her uncle when she has the desire to be a plumber. She is told to learn her place and to follow society’s rules of how a woman should behave. At the beginning of the film, Cluny meets a Czech philosopher named Belinski who has fled his country out of necessity due to the rise of Nazi control and establishment. Belinski tells Cluny the most important advice she receives in the film, to express herself however she wants and to do things her own way. Both of these characters are displaced. Both have a desire to live autonomously by their own freedoms of life and yet they are restrained by the culture they find themselves in. Cluny cannot be a liberated woman in a society of sexual repression and feminist control, especially one that looks down at her economic status of the lower class. Belinski cannot be a free thinker in his own country because of the rise of fascist control. Both Cluny and Belinski feels out of place in a place full of people who are completely satisfied with their place in the world, even the manor’s help feel proud of their lower stance in the immediate hierarchy. They are even aghast when Belinski speaks to one of them directly, remarking how uncouth it was for him to treat them as equals. This film was released in 1946, just after the second world war had ended, but the story takes place in 1938, just before the onset of the war. This time period is important to understanding the temperament of Europe at the time. The temperament being that of societal hierarchy and suspension of the human spirit in order to achieve a more stagnant, controlled, and mechanical way of life and the mounting tensions that it brought. A Lubitsch film always pits a character to make a choice between two realities. This time around Cluny must make the decision between keeping in line with the well-to-do life of an local chemist who’s idea of her is that of something that must be controlled and kept in her proper place, or that of being a housemaid and having to keep her mouth shut and take orders from everyone, including the fellow maid service staff. However, a third option (which the audience is aware of throughout the film) is presented to Cluny in the form of Belinski, who throughout the film tells Cluny that she needs to march to beat of her own drum and abandon this manufactured society of power, control, and proper etiquette in exchange for individual freedom to be one’s true self and follow one’s own desires. At the end of the film, Belinski and Cluny abandon this absurd and stale society to follow the beat of their own drums and achieve the self-liberation they desired, and that Europe greatly needed.  

Camerawork:

 Lubitsch primarily focuses his attention in his films on the wealthy and their private lives, offering up the complexities of being human and making human choices. But with Cluny Brown, Lubitsch treats his wealthier characters with more disdain and resentment. This keeps in taste with the point of view the film is making about the ignorance of the upper class society of Europe right before its collapse. Lubitsch disregards the lively frivolity of his earlier films with the drearier color saturation of Cluny Brown, offering up a wearier look at the state of the world, after his hometown of Berlin was in shambles following the war.

Best Shot:  

It is in this shot that Cluny is between the two men that are vying for her affections. One is the well-to-do chemist, who continuously tells Cluny what to do and how to behave and offers her a comfortable living situation in which she will be tied to this snobbish country town forever. The other is Belinksi, who continuously tells Cluny to follow her individual passions and creative desires throughout the film. It is in this frame that Lubitsch offers us the two pathways that Cluny must choose between, control or freedom.