The Merry Widow (1934)

 Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Merry Widow”

Thematic Elements: 

Ernst Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow tells the story of a man who shows the joys of sex and liberation to a widow, and the widow showing the joys of monogamy and intimacy to the man. Sonia is a widow who has spent the last year of her life cooped up in her mansion in mourning wearing all black all the time. Sonia wants to keep wallowing in her misery, restricting herself from the world and from other people. Danilo is the opposite, he knows everyone and has slept with every woman in the country, even most of Paris. He is carefree and always on the move. As the two start to fall in love, Sonia begins to break free from her wallowing black-clad confinement for a whiter and more open life. Danilo begins to make a real connection with her, something he hasn’t done for any women yet. He even says that every time a woman asks him if he loves her, he must lie to them. His falling in love with Sonia begins to open real connection with someone else rather than just superficial sex or flirtation. As Danilo snaps her out of her sadness, through montage we begin to see Sonia go from wearing all black to wearing all white, as if she is now pure again. Even her dog goes from being a black dog to a white one. Danilo has introduced Sonia back into the world of exploration and joie de vivre. However, there is something that Danilo lacks that Sonia is able to provide. The film is constantly concealing the true identity of the characters from Danilo. In the beginning of the film, Danilo doesn’t know that the woman he is trying to seduce is actually the woman he will be tasked of marrying later in the film. He doesn’t know that Fifi is actually that same woman, as well as the woman he is supposed to be pursuing, he doesn’t know that the ambassador is actually the ambassador when meeting him. When he first meets Sonia, he tells her he is in love with her even though he doesn’t even know who she actually is – to visual this, Sonia is even wearing a mask; Danilo can only see the bottom half of her face. Danilo is constantly unaware of who the people around him actually are. This might lean into the notion that even though Danilo is the most popular man in the country and in Paris, he doesn’t truly know anybody. Sonia is able to provide this new aspect on life in that he truly gets to know and actually fall in love with her. The two are able to give each other a new perspective on life that was greatly missing before. 

Another potential element of the film is the prospect that the marriage of the two characters are a construct of the government. In this film, the government wants to keep the rich widow in the country because her taxes account for half of the country’s income. They orchestrate the seductive and popular Danilo to seduce and marry her to keep her in the country. Perhaps a thematic element is that the construct of marriage is simply a mechanism of governmental control. Throughout the film, Lubitsch pulls us out of the relationship dynamics of the two protagonists in order to remind us of the bigger objective: to keep the widow from being a free woman so they can leach off of her. Lubitsch reminds us of this often, especially in the climactic scene in which Sonia and Danilo discover each other’s identity. Rather than showing us the fight that the two of them are having, Lubitsch shows us the ambassador describing the fighting to a servant writing a message to the king. In not allowing us to actually see the fight but instead hearing it through the lens of the bigger purpose, Lubitsch is perhaps undermining the very nature of their relationship. At the end of the film, the government even locks Sonia in a cell with Danilo to force the two to reconcile and have relations with one another. The physical act of locking these two up with each other against their wishes plays on the notion that greater powers force people into marriage for higher purposes. Perhaps Lubitsch is suggesting that marriage is an intentional act of institution. This insight might be a bit reaching, as there are a limited number of points to draw this conclusion. 

Camerawork: 

Lubitsch made this film in the style of a fairy tale. The film’s elements play to this fairy tale way of telling the story – Prince Charming, a grieving widow, a king and queen, a ball, and even a glass slipper. Lubitsch uses fairy tale elements in different ways. As Sonia is overlooking the night sky on her balcony, she sings as the stars shine over a glittering city, giving an air of magical realism. As Danilo steals Sonia’s shoe to lure her into the bedroom, he puts it back on her in the style of Cinderella slipping on her glass slipper. This allusion to fairy tale imagery suggests an enhanced state of reality. The characters are living a magical world of whimsy, rather than a centered concrete reality. This effect should disconnect the events in the movie from their reality, suggesting that these fancies are entirely elevated fiction

Best Shot: 

The best shots in the film is the sequence in which everyone at the ball begins dancing. The sequence lasts for a couple of minutes but features beautiful imagery that lends from Lubitsch’s magical reality. The complete harmony of the images and the harmony of the people dancing are a complete juxtaposition to the disharmony the two protagonists are feeling after their fight.