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Ida is the name of the heroine of our tale—Viktor is the name of the "Hero"
I watched Carl Theodor Dreyer's Master of the House (Du skal ære din hustru, 1925) because it was billed by Criterion as a comedy and to be honest that is not the first genre I associate with the director of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).
In fact I do think it's a comedy, although not the farce its premise might suggest. Adapted by Dreyer in collaboration with Svend Rindom, author of the source play Tyrannens fald—The Tyrant's Fall—the plot concerns the hard-knock reformation of an unappreciative paterfamilias forced to reckon with his own entitlement, not to mention laundry, meals, and childcare, in the absence of his desperately overworked wife. Screwballs and sitcoms have been made of such material. Dreyer's approach is less slapstick, more social drama. We are introduced to the Frandsen household via the morning routine of Astrid Holm's Ida, which is as quotidian and relatable as it is a death of a thousand cuts: open the blinds, feed the canaries, clean out the ashes and relight the stove, change the laundry on its line in the attic, sew on a button for her young son and run the times-tables with him before school, make up her husband's breakfast tray and entrust her teenage daughter with the coffee; all the while Johannes Meyer's Viktor lies sacrosanct in bed until he wakes on his own time, shouting for his slippers like a Nordic Henry Higgins. Immediately the household reorients itself around him and just as immediately he reveals himself to be a bottomless pit of kvetching. The coffee wasn't on the table before he got there. His wife didn't give him a spoon to stir it with. There's too little butter on his bread. (Ida mutely scrapes off her own barely spread slices to fatten his.) His shoes are freshly polished, but he seems to take their worn soles personally. His coat hasn't been brushed respectably enough. He has one of those pale-eyed faces whose clean, stern lines are wasted on such self-centered petulance; she's not prettier right now than she is bone-tired. By the time he finally leaves the sparely furnished little apartment with his businessman's umbrella and packet of sandwiches and a last passive-aggressive snipe or two, the audience may gasp for air like a bell jar's been lifted, except that nothing about his absence lessens Ida's frantic housework, barely managing a bite of bread and half a cup of coffee in between darning stockings and giving the toddler a bath. "From morning until evening, the little housewife had not a moment's peace . . ." Witness to these daily travails is the quietly formidable Miss Madsen, better known as "Mads" (Mathilde Nielsen); behind her round-rimmed spectacles, she has the practiced stink-eye of a disapproving grandmother and she's Viktor's old nanny. After a particularly unattractive display on her former charge's part, starting with the needless chastisement of his son and culminating with the cold rebuff of a treat his wife took especial care to prepare for him, Mads comes to a decision. So what if Viktor, like so many men in the post-WWI recession, feels embittered and emasculated by the loss of his business? His inability to swallow his machismo is killing his wife. By chance the next morning, after loyally defending her husband's behavior to her visiting mother (Clara Schønfeld), Ida is obliged to define a tyrant for her son's homework and has something of a breakthrough in the form of a breakdown; the entire family mobilizes to get her away and by the time Viktor returns from his all-day patronage of the local café, only his tiny, implacable nanny is there to greet him with a slice of thinly buttered bread and lines of laundry drying everywhere around the room just like he hates. She can't be cowed, even when his man-size tantrum smashes a potted plant, threatens the canaries, and frightens his daughter. Neither can the doctor (Johannes Nielsen) who hands him his hat with the professional advice, "You will go home and wait patiently until your wife is well . . . That is the best way to mend what has happened!" For the first time we see Viktor not just balked but stricken: he takes his hat and goes. And Mads, rising early, tidily prepares to show him exactly what he's been putting his wife through, in spades.
The film's Danish title is its moral—Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife—and it is seriously attentive to the pain of its exhausted heroine, who has so dutifully internalized her own subservience that when her mother tries to broach the appalling state of her marriage, her first reaction is to take the blame: "I may not be the way I should be . . . but that must change . . ." Only once her husband and his Sisyphean demands are out of her hair can she recognize their weight and damage, and then she has no idea how to deal with the information. "Months of suffering, scorn, and humiliations had marked Ida, our brave little wife. The thousand domestic chores had kept her going, but now that she had stepped off the treadmill, she broke down completely." Only when removed entirely from the responsibilities of her family—and all contact with her husband, though she writes on the sly to Mads—can she begin to heal. Our one glimpse of her in the sanitarium is sneakily, welcomely playful, foreshadowing the finale when, glowing and energetic as a stranger, Ida hides behind the slats of the kitchen closet to observe her once so much-missed husband, to see what kind of person he's become without her. It's an offstage journey, but it has to convince just as much as Viktor's slow, backsliding, eventually sincere reconstruction into an actual human being rather than a patriarchal jackass. Rather more humor is allowed to his discomfiture during the process, not least because the cold dignity he could stand on with his wife has zero traction with the titanic unimpressedness of Mads, who may be too old to turn him over her knee and spank him (it's not a major element, but fair warning that this film comes from a culture where the corporal punishment of children was taken as read) but not to mete out the emotional equivalent to his pride. "Do you know the feeling of suddenly facing an old teacher?" the novelistic intertitles ask. "Before you know it, you are fingering your trouser hem, you stutter and blush to the roots of your hair!" Viktor may not have it actually worse than Ida, but he's facing a tougher crowd. He was merely selfish and oblivious. Mads is twisting the knife. I appreciate that the film never plays the housework itself for comedy, as if the joke is Viktor's feminization: it's hard work and he's never had to do it and he's lucky his elder daughter is willing to teach him how to fold sheets properly, because his younger daughter certainly can't tell him how to change her diapers. Now he doesn't just wash his own dishes and polish his own shoes, he takes out the ashes and talks to the canaries and totes the clean laundry up from the courtyard as democratically as any dustman or washerwoman; he is becoming part of a household for the first time in his life, not just fixing himself at the head of one, and his dawning empathy for Ida is mixed inextricably with his longing for her. Early on, it is made clear to both the character and the audience that Viktor cannot simply earn his wife back. When he tries to coax his eldest Karen (Karin Nellemose) for a hint about the timeline of her mother's return, the cold-water answer he receives is "Not until Mads says you have been put in the corner!" The question then becomes what actual remorse looks like, whether Viktor can learn humility and not just humiliation. What will determine that is not a final tongue-lashing from Mads, however deserved—even after weeks of hard unlearning, he reacted jealously to the idea of his wife forming an attachment to another man during her rest cure—but a test of whether Ida and Viktor will simply revert to their old destructive patterns once reunited. So many comedies of remarriage leave their audiences to take the character growth on faith, I love the care with which this one delineates the proof that the change is permanent. Viktor finally, literally in the corner is comedically satisfying, a grown man in a three-piece suit with his face to the wall and his hands behind his back as he once made his son stand in wet stockings, but it is dramatically satisfying that the expression revealed as he turns at the sound of his wife calling his name is so tender and uncertain and vulnerable, an utter honesty we have never seen him offer her before, and it is not a punch line that for all his air of masculine normality restored as Mads brings in the coffee for supper, her sharp eyes don't miss the tell-tale scuffs on the knees of his pants where he knelt, formally and honestly, to apologize to his wife. As the reunited family gathers around the table, Mads casually reminds him to close the stove door and he does it like the no big deal it is for a functional adult who lives with other people. Ida doesn't skitter anxiously around the room to the neglect of herself; she takes her place at the table with the rest of her family. I believe that final shot of the heart-shaped clock pendulum swinging between the rejoined couple. And that makes it a comedy, too: if it doesn't end with a wedding, it's the next best thing.
I know almost nothing about Danish silent film except for other films I've seen by Dreyer, which means that any attempt to situate this one in context is doomed; the closest-looking genre with which I'm familiar is the German Kammerspielfilm, with its close observations of lower-middle-class life, but I don't know if it had the international currency of Expressionism. The cinematography by George Schnéevoigt, while we're on the subject, is not at all expressionist, although it's full of beautiful close-ups that let the actors' faces do the work far more than the interjected words. You could look at any of these people all day. The actual runtime is 107 minutes. I watched this film on the Criterion Channel, but if you'd like to try it, there seems to be a matching Criterion Blu-Ray/DVD. This corner brought to you by my recuperated backers at Patreon.
In fact I do think it's a comedy, although not the farce its premise might suggest. Adapted by Dreyer in collaboration with Svend Rindom, author of the source play Tyrannens fald—The Tyrant's Fall—the plot concerns the hard-knock reformation of an unappreciative paterfamilias forced to reckon with his own entitlement, not to mention laundry, meals, and childcare, in the absence of his desperately overworked wife. Screwballs and sitcoms have been made of such material. Dreyer's approach is less slapstick, more social drama. We are introduced to the Frandsen household via the morning routine of Astrid Holm's Ida, which is as quotidian and relatable as it is a death of a thousand cuts: open the blinds, feed the canaries, clean out the ashes and relight the stove, change the laundry on its line in the attic, sew on a button for her young son and run the times-tables with him before school, make up her husband's breakfast tray and entrust her teenage daughter with the coffee; all the while Johannes Meyer's Viktor lies sacrosanct in bed until he wakes on his own time, shouting for his slippers like a Nordic Henry Higgins. Immediately the household reorients itself around him and just as immediately he reveals himself to be a bottomless pit of kvetching. The coffee wasn't on the table before he got there. His wife didn't give him a spoon to stir it with. There's too little butter on his bread. (Ida mutely scrapes off her own barely spread slices to fatten his.) His shoes are freshly polished, but he seems to take their worn soles personally. His coat hasn't been brushed respectably enough. He has one of those pale-eyed faces whose clean, stern lines are wasted on such self-centered petulance; she's not prettier right now than she is bone-tired. By the time he finally leaves the sparely furnished little apartment with his businessman's umbrella and packet of sandwiches and a last passive-aggressive snipe or two, the audience may gasp for air like a bell jar's been lifted, except that nothing about his absence lessens Ida's frantic housework, barely managing a bite of bread and half a cup of coffee in between darning stockings and giving the toddler a bath. "From morning until evening, the little housewife had not a moment's peace . . ." Witness to these daily travails is the quietly formidable Miss Madsen, better known as "Mads" (Mathilde Nielsen); behind her round-rimmed spectacles, she has the practiced stink-eye of a disapproving grandmother and she's Viktor's old nanny. After a particularly unattractive display on her former charge's part, starting with the needless chastisement of his son and culminating with the cold rebuff of a treat his wife took especial care to prepare for him, Mads comes to a decision. So what if Viktor, like so many men in the post-WWI recession, feels embittered and emasculated by the loss of his business? His inability to swallow his machismo is killing his wife. By chance the next morning, after loyally defending her husband's behavior to her visiting mother (Clara Schønfeld), Ida is obliged to define a tyrant for her son's homework and has something of a breakthrough in the form of a breakdown; the entire family mobilizes to get her away and by the time Viktor returns from his all-day patronage of the local café, only his tiny, implacable nanny is there to greet him with a slice of thinly buttered bread and lines of laundry drying everywhere around the room just like he hates. She can't be cowed, even when his man-size tantrum smashes a potted plant, threatens the canaries, and frightens his daughter. Neither can the doctor (Johannes Nielsen) who hands him his hat with the professional advice, "You will go home and wait patiently until your wife is well . . . That is the best way to mend what has happened!" For the first time we see Viktor not just balked but stricken: he takes his hat and goes. And Mads, rising early, tidily prepares to show him exactly what he's been putting his wife through, in spades.
The film's Danish title is its moral—Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife—and it is seriously attentive to the pain of its exhausted heroine, who has so dutifully internalized her own subservience that when her mother tries to broach the appalling state of her marriage, her first reaction is to take the blame: "I may not be the way I should be . . . but that must change . . ." Only once her husband and his Sisyphean demands are out of her hair can she recognize their weight and damage, and then she has no idea how to deal with the information. "Months of suffering, scorn, and humiliations had marked Ida, our brave little wife. The thousand domestic chores had kept her going, but now that she had stepped off the treadmill, she broke down completely." Only when removed entirely from the responsibilities of her family—and all contact with her husband, though she writes on the sly to Mads—can she begin to heal. Our one glimpse of her in the sanitarium is sneakily, welcomely playful, foreshadowing the finale when, glowing and energetic as a stranger, Ida hides behind the slats of the kitchen closet to observe her once so much-missed husband, to see what kind of person he's become without her. It's an offstage journey, but it has to convince just as much as Viktor's slow, backsliding, eventually sincere reconstruction into an actual human being rather than a patriarchal jackass. Rather more humor is allowed to his discomfiture during the process, not least because the cold dignity he could stand on with his wife has zero traction with the titanic unimpressedness of Mads, who may be too old to turn him over her knee and spank him (it's not a major element, but fair warning that this film comes from a culture where the corporal punishment of children was taken as read) but not to mete out the emotional equivalent to his pride. "Do you know the feeling of suddenly facing an old teacher?" the novelistic intertitles ask. "Before you know it, you are fingering your trouser hem, you stutter and blush to the roots of your hair!" Viktor may not have it actually worse than Ida, but he's facing a tougher crowd. He was merely selfish and oblivious. Mads is twisting the knife. I appreciate that the film never plays the housework itself for comedy, as if the joke is Viktor's feminization: it's hard work and he's never had to do it and he's lucky his elder daughter is willing to teach him how to fold sheets properly, because his younger daughter certainly can't tell him how to change her diapers. Now he doesn't just wash his own dishes and polish his own shoes, he takes out the ashes and talks to the canaries and totes the clean laundry up from the courtyard as democratically as any dustman or washerwoman; he is becoming part of a household for the first time in his life, not just fixing himself at the head of one, and his dawning empathy for Ida is mixed inextricably with his longing for her. Early on, it is made clear to both the character and the audience that Viktor cannot simply earn his wife back. When he tries to coax his eldest Karen (Karin Nellemose) for a hint about the timeline of her mother's return, the cold-water answer he receives is "Not until Mads says you have been put in the corner!" The question then becomes what actual remorse looks like, whether Viktor can learn humility and not just humiliation. What will determine that is not a final tongue-lashing from Mads, however deserved—even after weeks of hard unlearning, he reacted jealously to the idea of his wife forming an attachment to another man during her rest cure—but a test of whether Ida and Viktor will simply revert to their old destructive patterns once reunited. So many comedies of remarriage leave their audiences to take the character growth on faith, I love the care with which this one delineates the proof that the change is permanent. Viktor finally, literally in the corner is comedically satisfying, a grown man in a three-piece suit with his face to the wall and his hands behind his back as he once made his son stand in wet stockings, but it is dramatically satisfying that the expression revealed as he turns at the sound of his wife calling his name is so tender and uncertain and vulnerable, an utter honesty we have never seen him offer her before, and it is not a punch line that for all his air of masculine normality restored as Mads brings in the coffee for supper, her sharp eyes don't miss the tell-tale scuffs on the knees of his pants where he knelt, formally and honestly, to apologize to his wife. As the reunited family gathers around the table, Mads casually reminds him to close the stove door and he does it like the no big deal it is for a functional adult who lives with other people. Ida doesn't skitter anxiously around the room to the neglect of herself; she takes her place at the table with the rest of her family. I believe that final shot of the heart-shaped clock pendulum swinging between the rejoined couple. And that makes it a comedy, too: if it doesn't end with a wedding, it's the next best thing.
I know almost nothing about Danish silent film except for other films I've seen by Dreyer, which means that any attempt to situate this one in context is doomed; the closest-looking genre with which I'm familiar is the German Kammerspielfilm, with its close observations of lower-middle-class life, but I don't know if it had the international currency of Expressionism. The cinematography by George Schnéevoigt, while we're on the subject, is not at all expressionist, although it's full of beautiful close-ups that let the actors' faces do the work far more than the interjected words. You could look at any of these people all day. The actual runtime is 107 minutes. I watched this film on the Criterion Channel, but if you'd like to try it, there seems to be a matching Criterion Blu-Ray/DVD. This corner brought to you by my recuperated backers at Patreon.
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It's utterly stunning!
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I have not; I'll check it out!
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Who says you have to choose?
(Yeah.)
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I try to!
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I thought so. It didn't stack its deck and it didn't handwave. Everyone was human-sized.
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It's so impressive to me that the ending works, because Viktor is just so awful at the start that you don't know why anyone would want to change him as opposed to just leave him flat. But the movie puts in the time to show him putting in the time and it takes about the time that it would need to, for the reasons it needs to, and so I believe it; I think they are both going to be all right. I've seen a lot worse from more recent movies.
Now I really want to rewatch Vampyr (1932).
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I remember also liking Dreyer's Day of Wrath a lot.
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I haven't seen that yet! I haven't seen Mikaël (1924), either, which between its landmark queerness and young beautiful Walter Slezak is just stupid.
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the expression revealed as he turns at the sound of his wife calling his name is ... tender and uncertain and vulnerable --Yes. I know that Dreyer can pull this transformation off, and I bet it was very moving.
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Thank you!
--Yes. I know that Dreyer can pull this transformation off, and I bet it was very moving.
It was, and it's one of the things the ending wouldn't have worked without. I should see a lot more Dreyer.