When love was like tuberculosis: surviving it was bad taste.

That moment when the newly saved'n'wed Pola Negri starts her rural feminity blend-in by removing dramatic makeup in front of the mirror, was akin to glimpsing kohled Nina Hagen cross over to a prudent Lillian Gish taking a shortcut through Boris Barnet's shawled Ms. Pitunova - her face clearing up but never reaching a flat-out au naturel, just as the film never transgresses settled histrionics toward "meta" schizoid hints, because this is film made before its splitting mirror phase. And oh it is so fragrant of Delluc!

Or how to fully utilize a film's intensive capacity as opposed to extensive in either referential or symbolic form. Two incestuous lovers disunite but this brings no liberation, since the world as a desire machinery rewrites their love like a fugue in various episodes that sweep them back to the opening key and setting - waterfront villa Agatha between a wiped clean undivided sea and the deserted contrapuntal streets.