Among the cocks like fire the red fox
Lili - dir. Charles Walters (1953)
I can't quite explain what made me watch this - maybe the fact that one of my favourite records of all time has Tim Buckley singing the theme song as a middle part of his own "Carnival Song" (although as I found out, his rendition has very little to do with the annoying original as performed in the film). It might also have something to do with the fact that I'm a sucker for circus-themed films in general. In this respect, I'm as hopeless a romantic as hopeless romantics go - after all, it is hard to imagine a more opportunistically melodramatic scenario than one where tragic lives are portrayed against the backdrop of the most bittersweet form of entertainment business, the circus.
Yes, I'm a sad little clown.
Then again, "Lili" goes way over the top even by my standards regarding saccharine tearjerkers. Consider this: A 16-year old, down on her luck orphan girl, Lili (Leslie Caron), finds refuge in a circus where she falls head over heels in love with a sleazebag magician. Meanwhile, a formerly famous dancer who has been crippled in the war (Mel Ferrer), tries to convey his hopeless love for the girl using his hand puppets. That's right - hand puppets. Lili, however, seems to be completely void of any ability for judgement or discrimination and as such, fails to see the obvious. And we're talking declarations of love by a guy that uses hand puppets to convey his feelings. To me this is way beyond any ordinary romantic film convolutions that utilise the theme of forlorn love. In fact, one has to wonder whether the constantly pained expressions on Ferrer's face are due to the fact that his jailbait infatuation seems to be a complete retard. Oh love, why art thou blind?
What's interesting - and kind of kinky - is the fact that Lili's inconceivable innocence and virginity have all the trappings of a De Sadean "Justine" character. She's basically reduced into a caricature of the mythical Good Girl Gone Bad, although the forced happy ending strips her of any power this characterization might entail. There's also a kind of Surrealist aspect in the high camp, Wizard of Oz-like dream sequences where Lili first portrays herself as a desired Real Woman and later on, after realizing the puppeteer's true feelings, as a willing victim of his advances. And this is what it looks like:
