Eldorado (1921) - film review

Rejected by her former lover and protector, Sibilla is forced to work as a dancer in a bawdy Spanish night club to earn the money she needs to buy medicine for her sick son.  She also works as a model for a Scandinavian artist Hedwick who, she discovers, is planning a secret rendez-vous with his lover, on the evening of her engagement to another man.  That woman is Iliana, the daughter of Sibilla’s cruel ex-lover Esteria.  Fearing that her young son is dying, Sibilla attempts to confront Esteria face-to-face, but she is thrown out of his house.  Remembering Hedwick’s secret liaison, Sibilla decides to take her revenge on Esteria...

El Dorado was one of first popular successes for the avant-garde French director Marcel L’Herbier, who went on to make some of the finest films of the silent era (most famously his 1929 masterpiece, L’Argent).  Despite its comparative obscurity, El Dorado is a mesmerising work and ought to be considered as one of the best examples of early French cinema.

The film resonates with its vivid depiction of raw emotions, which range from the anguish of a mother unable to cure her dying son, a burning lust for revenge when Sibilla is spurned by her ex-lover, and the sheer horror of an attempted rape.  It uses simple but effective cinematic devices (such as dizzying camera movements or out-of-focus blurring) to put the spectator in the place of the film’s protagonists, particularly the tragic heroine Sibilla, so that we see the world through their eyes.    Perhaps the most remarkable thing about El Dorado is how L’Herbier manages to take a conventional 19th century-style melodrama and transform it into an enthralling, inescapable dream-like fantasy.

Virtually every camera shot in this film resembles a work of art, demonstrating as much craftsmanship as imagination on the part of L’Herbier and his photography directors.  Particularly impressive is the way that light and shade are exploited to maximum effect to reinforce the states of mind of the film’s protagonists, making dialogue not just superfluous but totally irrelevant.  This is a film which takes place in the mind, a haunting, emotionally strained fantasy where the cruelty and injustices in the real world are distilled and coalesced into a simple portrait of desperation and suffering.

New Wave director Alain Resnais admitted that he was influenced by the work of Marcel L’Herbier, and El Dorado has a similar cinematic style to Resnais’ 1961 masterpiece L’Année dernière à Marienbad.  This is noticeable in many areas, such as in the use of harsh geometric lines to break up and separate light and dark tones, and the way in which the surroundings dominate and emphasise the puny helplessness of the characters within them.  Whilst Resnais’ film feels cold and detached, L’Herbier’s El Dorado is far more intimate and passionate, although both films have the capacity to constantly surprise their audience with their daring cinematography.

© James Travers 2002

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