Prix de Beauté was made on the cusp of the changeover from silence to sound, which came a little later in Europe than in Hollywood. Originally conceived as a silent, it was released with a dubbed soundtrack in France, with a French actress speaking Louise Brooks' lines, but was released as a silent in Italy and other parts of Europe. I was lucky enough to see the Cineteca di Bologna's flawless new restoration of an Italian silent print at the Tribeca Film Festival. I haven't seen the talkie version yet, but I think it's safe to assume the silent version is much more satisfying, since by all reports the dubbing is poorly done (Louise Brooks is clearly speaking English, so there's no way her lips could be matched.) Also, the film is made entirely in the silent style, with few titles and little need for dialogue. Prix de Beauté tells its story visually, with exciting, imaginative camera-work. The opening is instantly kinetic, with rapidly-cut scenes of urban life and swimmers splashing at a public beach. Throughout the film there is an emphasis on visual detail, on clothing, machinery, decoration, and symbolic images such as a caged bird, a heap of torn photographs, a diamond bracelet. This is silent film technique at its pinnacle.
Louise Brooks, of course, is responsible for saving the film from obscurity. Seeing this makes it only more heartbreaking to reflect that this was her last starring role. Lustrously beautiful, she dominates the film with her charisma and also gives a perfectly natural yet highly charged performance. Her role here, more than in the Pabst films for which she's best known, is a woman we can fully understand and sympathize with. She plays Lucienne Garnier, a typist with a possessive fiancé, who yearns to get more out of life and secretly enters a beauty contest, with immediate success. She is then torn between the excitement of her glamorous new life and her love for the man who insists she give it all up or lose him. All of the characters are drawn with nuance. The fiancé inspires pity and is not merely a brute: he loves Lucienne, but is a limited man who can't cope with her having a life apart from him or attracting the attentions of other men. Even the "other man" in the story is not the simple slimeball we first take him for, though his intentions may be just as possessive as the fiancé's.
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The film has many fine set pieces, including Lucienne's triumph in the "Miss Europe" contest, shown through the comic reactions of assorted audience members, who wind up pelting the heroine with flowers; her misery as a housewife, peeling potatoes while the pendulum of the cuckoo clock marks time behind her; a nightmarish trip to a fun-fair (in the silent version, this occurs late in the film, after her marriage) at which Lucienne, crushed among the low-lifes and depressed by her husband's macho antics, decides that she can't go on with her present existence; and especially the final scene in the projection room where she views her talkie screen test. Louise Brooks may never have looked more beautiful than she does here, with the projector's beam flickering on her alabaster profile, her shoulders swathed in white fur, her face incandescent under the black helmet of hair as she watches herself singing on screen. The double shot of her exquisite corpse and her still-living image on the screen is particularly poignant: Louise Brooks' image, like Lucienne's, remains immortal despite her frustratingly aborted film career.