User Reviews

Machaty went on to direct "Ekstase", which is a pretty good movie with a theme similar to "Erotikon" but which is probably more popular because there is a scene in which a plump Hedy Lammar runs through the woods naked.

Nobody is naked here but the air is heavy with sexual tension. A wealthy, smooth man (Olaf Fjord) is stuck overnight in the house of a railroad worker, manages to seduce his host's daughter (Ita Rina), and blithely takes off on the morning train. He's left a little souvenir behind. Rina is pregnant and after she goes through the agony of childbirth she's shunned by the village and travels aimlessly to the city.

She hitches a ride with a wagon driver. The driver gets drunk and tries to rape her, while Machaty cuts several times to a shot of the horses' heads as they plod philosophically along. The weak and desolate young lady is saved by another, older rich man (Pistek) who is stabbed almost to death in the process. The couple fall in love and are married.

Then at a piano store they run into Fjord, who is now gallivanting around with someone else's wife. Rina introduces him as an old friend and invites him on a trip. The old glandular glow is still there and Rina's husband senses it. Fjord is cavalier about the whole business but would still like to spend an hour or two alone with Rina, after he dumps his current blond floozy, an achievement that turns out to be more difficult than he'd thought.

It begins to get a little turgid, I know, and begins to sound a little like the "women's pictures" with Joan Crawford or someone that came out of Hollywood in the 30s and 40s. It's held together, though, by two things.

One is Ita Rina. I suppose Fjord must be considered handsome. With his painted lips and darkened eyes he looks too much like Dracula, but he DOES have two horny women mooning over him. But Ita Rina is different. She's a beauty by any metric. Here eyes are slanted and large. When she's excited, the irises are surrounded entirely by the whites. I can't do that. I just tried it in the mirror. And her nose is exquisite. It begins between her eyebrows, disregarding the usual need for a glabella, and cleaves her features in two. That nose is magnetic, exactly the right size for nibbling.

The other feature that lends some verve to these melodramatic goings on is the arty direction by Machaty. Half of what we see seems to stand for something else. The husband and the boy friend have a friendly game of chess, with Rina seated behind her new husband, obviously rooting for the devilish and pheromonal Fjord. Now, if a director can make something interesting of a five-minute chess game in a silent movie, my hat is off to him. At another point, he's got the camera fixed to the cow catcher of a locomotive, aimed rearward to catch the spinning iron wheels. At the end, he's got the camera fixed to one of those steel shafts that goes UP AND DOWN as the wheels rotate. It's dizzying, I'll tell you.

Some of the parts available on YouTube lack English subtitles, and this may be a problem for some people who aren't familiar with the language. Well, I don't speak Czech but I am a skilled linguist and could follow the events without confusion, even though Czech is the only language in the world that is written and spoken using consonants almost exclusively. No one could miss a simple conversational exchange like:

"Janaczeck dvorjak vrchlicky michna z otradovic krllvck?"

"PSST!"