📽 MASTER OF THE HOUSE [Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1925] - Movie review by Mandibil

Dreyer is the pride of classic danish cinema and his is a body of work i look forward to review. I have got the recent BFI box with the most important features and shorts - that are all going to find their way into this blog. He is quite unique already at this very early point in his directorial career and we get the strong emotional depths and emphasis on facial expressions, that would become a trademark a later. This film is based on a stage play by Svend Rindom, that is considered more comic than the film adaptation. Dreyer points out in the intro notes - that this is considered something that could happen in all homes throughout the city and there is a clear every day feel to it.

Intertitles tell us, that housewife Ida (Astrid Holm) "hides her sorrow and worries" as she rises early and starts her day. She heats up the stove, makes coffee, prepares lunchboxes, does the washing and so on. Her husband Viktor (Johannes Meyer) sleeps longer and awaits the breakfast is ready. When he wakes up he yells for his slippers and gets ready to go eat. He is constantly unsatisfied with his wife´s job and keeps reminding her what she should or shouldn't do. He generally treats her very disrespectfully.

As he leaves the apartment, the old spinster Madsen (Mathilde Nielsen) who used to be Viktor´s nanny, arrives on the stairs. Now and then she stops by to help out Ida with the housekeeping. She has her worries about how Ida has been treated lately, but Ida begs her not to provoke Viktor when he gets back.

We also learn that Viktor has recently lost his business (as optician) and it has made him annoyed and harsh. Viktor keeps being a jerk to everyone around him. He punishes his son harshly for wearing his shoes to quickly and gets annoyed that the youngest daughter cries, because of the tension. Ida does what she can to even out the feelings of everyone, but the situation seems to converge towards an inevitable collapse. When she has to check up on the sons reading homework, she is struck by the horror of the truth when her son asks, "what is a Tyrant?" and the book explains "a Tyrant is a cruel MAN of violence who mistreats and oppresses those around him".

Mads gets a hold of Ida´s mother and they decide that Ida must be removed from the home and "hidden" away from Viktor. Mads takes over the household and she has apparently conjured up a plan to give Viktor a lesson. We learn that, when Viktor was a child, Mads gave him a beating that she could feel herself for days (in her hands presumably). Referring to that incident, she starts to order him around and "forces" him to do the different things, that Ida used to do. She forces him to pay for having a washing lady do the clothes for him since Mads would not be prepared to do the washing herself in that cold cellar of theirs. She basically puts him through a humiliating trial of things he must do, while treated as disrespectfully as he himself treated Ida.

Slowly Viktor realizes that he has been behaving like a jerk. At first his attitude is still superior towards Mads, but as she keeps threatening him with punishment and harsh language, he becomes more an more acquiescent. He tries to lure the whereabouts of Ida out of the oldest daughter, but she will not tell, even when he tries to bribe her with a new dollhouse for Christmas.

Viktors trials ends with him standing in the naughty corner just as he made his son do before, until he can behave decently. After weeks of "torture" Ida has finally arrived back at the house and after experiencing how Viktor has been subjugated by Mads, she finally appears to him. He keeps apologizing for his behavior and promises to always be a nice man. Ida´s then hands him the money to buy a new optician store and the family is happily united including Mads and Ida´s mother around the coffee table.

In danish the movie is called "Thou shalt honor thy wife", which has obvious religious references. It is not a religious movie, but in my opinion it does have a Jesus reference in the sacrificial interpretation of Ida. Now one can wonder why there are no commandment that says the same thing about the husband, but guess they do not need to be honored. it is very clear that the purpose is to hail women as those unsung heroes that makes the world go round by doing homely chores, but in my mind this is just a mother-complex that has been projected unto the idea of wife.

I am not defending the actions of Viktor, he behaves very bad (and deliberately too much so to make the audience hate him). But we do not get to know of how Ida helped him get over the loss of his business, if that is in fact the reason of his behavior. On the other hand, if he really is such a jerk and has been all the time, why has Ida chosen to marry him and why have her mother or Mads not told her not to marry him. We do not get to hear about how hard Viktors job had been, and wisely they chose an "easier" job to make things sound easier for him. But what about all those men working 10 hours in coal mines or out in the rain as a builder or whatever.

A housewife does not have a boss, she can plan her day and do thing in her own pace. She can eat when she likes, she can rest when she likes. She have contact with the children, she can have nanny over or strike a conversation with the neighbors wife and so on. But nooo ... she is doing ALL the work and without her, the world would break down. The dominant Mads states that men are stupid, ignorant and vain and intertitles tells us about the brave little feet of the valiant housewives that run forth and back from room to room all day to make ends meet. This is pure gynocentric propaganda. And the worst of it all is the apparent sadistic pleasure that Mads expresses as she get s her revenge on Ida´s behalf. I mean, who does she think she is. She has been eating and drinking at their home for years and now she thinks she can control the family because she can wield the whip of righteousness.

The underlying white knighting for women is at times close to unbearable. It is a very one-dimensional portrait of the relation between men and women. And I say this because the movie extrapolates this scenario to represent all marriages. So it becomes a political propaganda instrument as the directors own mother relations are fused with the wife figure. At the same time the female fantasy that a violent alfamale can be domesticated into a loving house father beta male, is just that ... a fantasy.

But when that is said, Dreyer really has a gift for reaching in and grab your feelings. He is not affraid of keeping pounding you with the same morale and let if explode when you have nearly enough. He brilliantly bridges the transition of Viktor from tyrant to a man in contact with his inner most desires and feelings. Another praise has to go to Johannes Meyers job with Viktor. This is probably his biggest role in his career and he is phenomenally good. All the other actors and supports does a great job too, not least the daughter, with whom we get a glimpse that she has a deeper connection with Viktor than first meets the eye. very elegantly visualized.

For my artistic heart, there are scenes that just pops right out at you, like when Viktor stares out towards you with a sad face and tears of regret in his eyes. Or when in the ending we see Mads stand arranging the coffee table and the rest of the family placed correctly around the frame to show that, Mads is actually the Master of the House. And i want to extend my final analysis of the movie and that is, Mads is a metaphor for the state. She is an old virgin, she is not engaged in the society within the sexes relations that are the theme of the movie. She threatens with violence and have used violence on a regular basis on Viktor. She threatens Viktor to conform to the "new" rules of the matriarchy (that just received the vote a few years before) and that the women are protected by the state and the state will tax him as it sees fit for services the state thinks he needs.

Rating: 8/10