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By Andrea Thompson
It's still Noirvember, and I wanted to mark the occasion with another noir film directed by a woman. Having discussed Ida Lupino's “Outrage” last week, my options were predictably limited. Lupino was practically the only female director working in Hollywood at the time, and breaking it down by the genre made pickings far slimmer if I wanted to focus on a film by a different director.
But bless this wonderful age we live in, where there's always something somewhere that will reference the more obscure titles even some of the most devoted cinephiles haven't heard of. That, in short, is how I came across “Death is a Caress.” Made in 1949, it was apparently the first Norwegian film directed by a woman, and it upends many of the typical noir staples.
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The film is narrated via flashback, beginning as a police vehicle drives through the streets. Ah siren, siren, what crime brings you forth? This is how we meet Erik (Claus Wiese), the young man under arrest who proceeds to narrate the film via flashback to his lawyer. Before his troubles started, he was a successful mechanic who was engaged to a beautifully innocent, adoring young woman named Marit (Eva Bergh). In true noir fashion, the best you can say about her is that she's delightfully bland. During one of their interactions, the camera zooms in a lovely white ornament nearby, as if to dangle the possibility of a happy, pristine future that's not to be.
Needless to say, Sonja (Bjørg Riiser-Larsen ) fits neatly into the mold of the femme fatale from the minute she appears. She's not only married, she's older and in full possession of wealth all her own, having never needed a man to support her. She's beautiful, but it's in a different fashion than noir dames typically are, with the sheer force of her presence being a large component of the impression she makes. When she shows up, she strides right over to Erik and demands his attention on their first encounter, and nearly runs him over in the next.
As their seductive dance continues, Erik tries to resist it, take solace in Marit, and avoid Sonja, only to be drawn back to her more and more willingly. Even when he meets Sonja's oblivious husband, Erik and Sonja exchange the kind of knowing smirks and glances that can only mean one thing as their interactions become more and more charged, and Erik soon abandons Marit without looking back. When he and Sonja do finally consummate their mutual attraction, it's far more erotic due to the lack of interference from the Hays Code, even if it's far less graphic than the films of today.
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Surprisingly, Erik and Sonja's relationship soon incorporates love as well as lust, although Sonja has clearly formed similar liaisons previously. Sonja even promises Erik to divorce her husband and marry him. Even more shocking is that after an initial hesitation, Sonja actually follows through. But her and Erik's interactions have always been laced with harbingers of doom, and the problems start to arise as early as their honeymoon, and continue to grow throughout their relationship, which becomes more and more turbulent. Erik is somewhat resentful of Sonja's money and position, and she becomes more and more jealous and suspicious of him. Yet they always return to each other, until finally their mutually destructive impulses culminate in a horrifying climax.
This kind of toxic relationship is all too familiar, especially when it comes Erik's fatalistic mindset, which justifies his inability to take responsibility for his actions. He regrets what he's done, yet he believes it was inevitable, albeit in a more complex fashion than usual. As he puts it, things aren't decided in advance, but people have to follow their path, even if he allows that our choices are affected by our experiences. Granted, it's easy to trace the roots of this belief, since even Erik's boss remarks that they're one day closer to death at the end of the workday. Is all Nordic cinema obligated to somehow reference and/or grapple with death and existential angst in general?
Erik says he doesn't blame Sonja, but rather the class differences that kept them at odds. To the movie's credit, class itself is the source of much of the film's commentary on how many restrictions women face in their public and private lives, even when they seem to have a dizzying number of options. Yet at his sentencing, Erik seems determined to assign much of the blame to Sonja, not only claiming he never would've been a killer if he hadn't met her, but that Sonja actually participated in her own killing. He is unable to accept that he deserves to punished. And the system seems to partially agree, since Erik gets a mere five years for his crimes. Rather than vanishing, one could argue that this trope has merely evolved, with powerful women often being depicted as unstable at best, and still have a tendency to perish in the arms of the same men who profess their love for them.
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The movie's title becomes an indictment, unintentional or not, about how common this kind of brutality is, especially for the women who typically suffer the worst of the consequences. In every statistic, the rates for those who have experienced intimate partner violence are not only higher for women than men, but the CDC estimates that “nearly half of female homicide victims in the U.S. are killed by a current or former male intimate partner.” There's a lot of insight into a certain kind of toxicity that fuels many a vicious cycle. Like many co-dependent couples, the highs were dizzying, but the lows were also devastating.
As for Erik himself, his obsession with Sonja is still powerful enough that he seems perfectly capable of giving himself the life sentence his judges will not. By the end, sitting alone in the darkness of his cell while bathed in warm light from the nearby window, he first speaks into an unseen distance, then unsettlingly, directly to us as he says he still can't say he would've avoided her Sonja even if he knew how his time with her would end. He's still filled with a longing for not only her, but “a heaven or hell where they could meet again.”
