EROTIKON

An absent-minded entomologist has married a woman courted by a baron and a sculptor who, after denouncing his rival, runs off with the wife, leaving the husband to console himself with his niece. Mauritz Stiller’s film has much in common with Cecil B. DeMille’s light comedies of the 1920s. The play of the two couples is witty, retaining the light-hearted atmosphere of the Hungarian comedies. Erotikon greatly influenced Ernst Lubitsch, especially in his American comedies of the period 1925-1940, and Billy Wilder. According to Georges Sadoul, Stiller’s masterly direction made it the ‘first erotic-sophisticated film, not only in Scandinavian but also in European cinema, against the moral pedantry of the cinema of the time. The subject of the film was fundamentally immoral, but Stiller managed to soften its scabroussness by presenting the situations only by allusion and innuendo’.