User Reviews

Louise Brooks is luminous in this rather trite tale of a young girl's ruination and regeneration. The plot line founders toward the end but, as a whole, DIARY OF A LOST GIRL is notable for its arresting visuals and set-piece sequences. Unfortunately, we'll never see G.W. Pabst's original intent:

"THE DIARY OF A LOST GIRL was based on the moralistic novel by Margarete Bohme... But the censors did not miss the point. They butchered DIARY more brutally than PANDORA. In the ending Pabst intended, Thymiane was to become the proprietress of her own high-class brothel, rejecting respectability in favor of the wealth and power that a rotten bourgeoisie could respect. But the censors insisted that Thymiane embrace precisely the kind of sentimental reformism that Pabst disdained, twisting the film into conformity with German middle-class values. Pabst capitulated because he had to coexist with them and because he would live to fight another day for such subsequent (and better) films as ...THE THREEPENNY OPERA... DOALG was a kind of sacrificial lamb, as its scenarist, Rudolf Leonhardt, affirms: 'Pabst's accommodating nature had already made him prepared to make two different endings -for vice, even involuntary vice, must not go rewarded. Where the censors had not forbidden passages beforehand, entire filmed sequences were cut without mercy later on...'"

I love what there is of it (especially the brothel & reformatory scenes), but I was never in the majority:

"But it was death, rather than immortality, that awaited DOALG at the box office upon its release... The influential critic Hans G. Lustig gave it a single withering paragraph in 'Der Tempel'... No serious criticism of DOALG could take place until three decades later...Lost on most critics was the fact that Pabst's technique in DOALG was different from that of PANDORA. Lotte Eisner, virtually alone, recognized a new, semi-documentary restraint: 'Pabst now seeks neither Expressionistic chiaroscuro nor Impressionistic glitter; and he seems less intoxicated than he was by the beauty of his actress."

Highly recommended!

The melodrama we would love with Stahl's and Sirk's works was born with Pabst .We are far from DW Griffith's "orphans in the storm" !Although implausible,this film has realist accents and Pabst's directing takes our breath away. And what a beautiful last line:"Nobody's lost when there's a little love!"

Melodrama is par excellence a woman's story. An unfairly treated woman. Its construction is parabolic: happiness,downfall,redemption. But "Tagebuch" is much more complex;its first part already features tragedy:Elisabeth's suicide is a sinister omen.

Admirable sequences:

The reformatory where two martinets (a shrew and a terrifying smiling bald man)treat their pupils like dogs. The scene when the girls eat their soup is unforgettable.

The scene at the notary's office where Thymiane returns good for evil ,which climaxes the movie. Pabst uses no (or so few) subtitles : his pictures have the strength of a Chaplin movie. The close-up on Meinert's hand after the girl has refused to shake it,sublimates her redemption.

The final scene when Thymiane meets again her former mate and her final rebellion:"I know the benefits of that house!"

Like very few silent movies,"Tagebuch" can grab today's audience at least as much as "Pandora's box" (aka "Loulou" aka "der büchse der Pandora"). Both movies have a very dense screenplay full of twists and unexpected ends -Loulou's death in the former;Thymiane's rebellion in the latter). Both feature Louise Brooks ,who remains an attractive woman even by today's canons when so many silent screen actresses'charm -and actors' - seems outdated nowadays (think of Brigitte Helm -Maria in Lang's masterpiece "Metropolis"). Her charisma was so strong that she did not have to speak to move us. That may account for her failure in the talkies.

Do not miss Pabst's anti-war "West front 1918" either. It compares favorably to Milestone's "All quiet on the western front" and Gance's "J'accuse".

The comments submitted are from Josh76's Dad, Dan47 I found this film to be deeply moving. Louise Brooks portrays the innocent Thymiane with such pathos that I wanted to reach out to the screen and rescue her. Unlike most films from this period there is no rescue in "the nick of time". Events follow an inexorable nightmare pattern as Thymiane, the victim, is condemned to imprisonment after being raped and impregnated by her father's employer. Abandoned financially and emotionally by her selfish father she can only fall into prostitution after she escapes the home for wayward girls. I couldn't help being reminded of "The Magdalene Sisters", another film where girls are blamed for the lustful acts of their attackers and seducers. Louise Brooks expresses more with her eyes then most actors do with paragraphs of dialogue. Even during the giddiest parties in the brothel she expresses desperation, despair and regret with rare subtlety. Despite its' age and the lack of sound the film stands up well. The presentation is not overly sentimentalized, though the enduring "goodness" of the Thymiane and her eventual "redemption" might stretch the imagination. In an age where "human trafficking" is running rampant we could use an actress of such beauty, charisma, and sympathy to portray the continuing plight of girls and women driven into the sordid life of prostitution.

'Diary of a Lost Girl' is a classy silent feature which centres on Thymian (Louise Brooks, fresh from 'Pandora's Box'), first seen as sweet and innocent young thing who takes the wrong turning after becoming pregnant by her father's pharmacy assistant (the repellent Fritz Rasp).

Sent to a reformatory for fallen young ladies which is run by a shaven headed thug and a butch matron, she meets Erika (Edith Meinhard), a sometime prostitute, and eventually escapes with her to join a brothel, fall in with a rich count, and find her fortune.

Directed with panache by Pabst, this film still has a fresh feel and some beautiful close-up photography of Brooks in particular. The tale of Thymian's ups and downs keeps you interested right to the final few sequences. Wonderfully atmospheric and well acted, this film is a good example of a late silent.

In this film, Pabst lets Louise Brooks act in a way that is more suited to the classic silent style. The result is a better film than the much vaunted Pandora's Box. It is ironic that when rock group OMD performed their song "Pandora's Box" on TV (a song dedicated to Miss Brookes) the footage they showed was from this film and not "Pandora's Box!"

It is the story of an orphan who makes a tough journey from children's home to ladyship, whose final scene takes her back to the very children's home she escaped from.

Louise Brooks's performance is much more acceptable in this film, and shows a great degree of film mime ability.

I would also like to single out Andrei Engelmann for the superb performance in the final scene: you never know whether he recognises the lady as one of his escapees.

I have never been an admirer of Pabst. I find his films to be studies of depraved Germans and their feasting on the innocent. His men are weaklings, rapists, schemers, or all three. His women are either brothel madams or sadistic, repressed victimizers. Against these he plays an innocent ingénue, who eventually falls into the traps laid for her and either does or does not escape.

SPOILERS AHEAD: Diary Of A Lost Girl, one of two silent films he made with American personality Louise Brooks, and her last silent film, pits the naïve Brooks as a daughter of a pharmacist, who is a lecher, and who stands by and permits his assistant to deflower her. He then forces her into a reform dormitory, run by a sadistic pair Dickens would have gloried in, and gives her illegitimate baby up for adoption. At the reformatory, from which she eventually escapes, she falls in with other "lost" people, who become her friends.

The last half of the film becomes somewhat unbelievable in its sudden coincidences and turns for the better. She enters a brothel and is successful there until her father's death leaves her an heiress. From there it is a series of escapes from her "past," concluding with redemption for one of her "lost" compatriots.

Brooks is no actress. She never was. I have seen a number of her films and am amazed she became a star at all. She so resembled both Clara Bow (a far better actress) and Colleen Moore (a better romantic tragedian), I wonder she got a foothold in the door. Her face, no matter what happens to her, is blank and wistful. It is a beautiful face and at times she shows some facial expression, but it is rare. She does have "presence" on screen. I will grant her that. I kept wondering what the performance might have been like had Pabst retained and nurtured Garbo (she came to the US after filming The Joyless Street for Pabst) for the role.

Pabst use of other actors and actresses who range from plain to ugly does emphasize Brook's beauty and the casting may have been deliberate. The cinematography and editing are perfunctory. None of the sumptuousness of his later The Love of Jeanne Ney is present here. Two remarkably homely performers, Fritz Rasp as Meinert, the assistant who ruins her, and Valeska Gert, the sadistic matron of the reformatory, are creepily evil and repellent. He later used Rasp in Jeanne Ney and had used Gert earlier as the madam in Joyless Street.

Two scenes stand out visually: the mechanically synchronized reformatory eating scene (right out of Oliver Twist); the girls' tossing of the diary from bed to bed and eventually converging on the matron with fists.

The film is mildly interesting to modern audiences, primarily as an example of Brooks' work and of Pabst's subject matter, but ultimately fails in my opinion from our inability to empathize with the somnolent leading lady.

The is the best film that Louise Brooks made. It is far better than the overlong "Pandora's Box", and the more I have thought about it the stranger it seems that "Dairy of a Lost Girl" should not be more famous than its overblown predecessor.

The fame of "Pandora's Box" is attributable to the image and presentation of Louise Brooks as an archetype - not unlike a mannequin or fashion plate for a generation of 'liberated' German girls. "Diary of a Lost Girl" is forgotten despite its artistic superiority and the revelation that Brooks was not just a sensational beauty but a very fine actress to boot. In most of her films Brooks was called upon to pose, and perhaps to smirk - and she did it very well, but she was not asked to do any more, which might have explained her mounting frustration with the American movie business.

After she completed "Pandora's Box" she sailed back to the U.S.A., perhaps expecting to be treated with greater consideration by the Paramount executives who had been driven to distraction by her uncompromising (selfish?) working methods. The long suffering managing executive B. P. Shulberg offered her a much higher salary in order to turn her last American silent, "The Canary Murder Case" (which I have not seen) into a talkie. Oddly, she viewed this as an insult and treated Shulberg with undeserved contempt. Having destroyed her relationship with Adolph Zukor's Paramount she returned to G. W. Pabst in 1929 - she presumably hoped that Hom-Film would be a more accommodating employer. Accommodating, that is, of her increasingly erratic and temperamental work habits, which were lubricated by a heroic consumption of alcohol.

Pabst obviously had a great affection for her (who wouldn't, even allowing for her often lamentable behaviour?), and he famously remarked on the last day of shooting that 'Your life is like Lulu's, and you will end the same way'. That was almost prophetic, and her failure to register (to Pabst) that she was in any way aware of the consequences of her folly, was discreditable. So when I look at a film as good as "Diary of a Lost Girl" I am as conscious of her striking ability, as I am appalled by what she threw away through sheer wilful arrogance.

The story, by Margarete Bohme, caused a great scandal in 1905. It replicated the tale of the baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who committed suicide in 1927. It was not just the subject (a very candid treatment of prostitution that revealed a sordid and - worse still - undisciplined underbelly to Wilhelmine society), but the outspoken attack on the reformatory system, on the conditional and de haut en bas nature of charitable provision, and the strong suggestion of feminism that was highly offensive in a rigidly paternalistic social system.

Attitudes towards manners and morals changed emphatically with the establishment of the Weimar regime, and Bohme's novel was first filmed in 1919. A decade later, and having established herself as a poster child for sexual liberation, the role of Thymiane Henning seemed ripe for fresh treatment by Brooks.

Brooks performs the role of the wronged daughter who has suffered a 'fate worse than death' at the hands of a repellant apothecary's assistant (an excellent performance by the great Fritz Rasp); brutal treatment at a reformatory (more great stuff from Andrews Engelmann and a sadistic Valeska Gert - a differentiated reprise of the Sapphic character of Countess Geschwitz played by Alice Roberts in "Pandora's Box"), to further disappointments in the brothel, etc. The entire ensemble turns out a first class performance, and Pabst and Sepp Allgeier ensure that the photography complements the power of the story.

While it was common during the silent era for Europeans like Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino to cross the Atlantic and make it big in America, Louise Brooks, as was her nature, went against the grain and headed in the opposite direction, where she made it big in three European films, two directed by G. W. Pabst. Of the two, "Pandora's Box" is the better film, but "Diary of a Lost Girl" is the film that made me fall in love with the girl in the black helmet.

"Diary" doesn't have the sure hand of Pabst's direction in "Pandora," but it does have a story and characters that are more easily accessible. And though I feel "Pandora" is one of the greatest films ever made, it took me a few viewings to recognize the scope of its originality. And Brooks' character Lulu, though fascinating and exquisitely performed, is somewhat impenetrable.

Thymian, the character Brooks plays in "Diary," is an innocent caught up in circumstance and the social mores of her time. The very nature of her character makes us care what happens to her. Without resorting to cloying sentimentality, Pabst manages to create a character in Thymian that gets under our skin emotionally, even when she succumbs to manipulation by others. (Big spoilers in next sentence, so skip to next paragraph if you haven't seen the film): After being raped, giving birth to an illegitimate child and sent away by her family to an institution for delinquent girls, then losing her baby and becoming a prostitute, Pabst keeps us rooting for her to succeed in life, however she chooses.

Pabst's effectiveness is due in no small part to Brooks' performance. Her detractors have suggested that she wasn't much of an actress, just a pretty face playing herself. Yet, all anyone has to do is see the two Pabst films back to back to realize what different characters Brooks created from two, in many ways, similar roles. I do not see an ounce of Lulu in Thymian. If Brooks was channeling just herself, she had some far ranging personality facets to select from. But whatever she was doing, I'm just very glad it was captured on film.

I prefer not to say much about the plot of this film, because there are some nice surprises throughout and though I've checked the spoiler box for this comment because of the brief description of what happens to Thymian, I don't want to spoil the film's wonderful twists and turns for those who happen to read this.

Technically, the film is beautifully shot, and although it doesn't possess the dark atmosphere of "Pandora," it does have it's own distinctive look via locale, set design and some spectacular camera moves, particularly a wonderful shot that follows Thymian up a stairway. The secondary characters, particularly in the girls institution, are far more caricatured than need be, and the humor is overdone in spots, but none of that detracts from the unusually forward story being told. Like "Pandora," the film is ahead of its time. And although Pabst did not shoot the ending he wanted, I find the ending used one of the most satisfying things about the film.

See this film and fall head over heels for the girl in the black helmet.

Leaving Hollywood was a gamble for Louise Brooks, who had by the end of the Twenties reportedly grown restless with the studio system and had traveled to Europe. There she became involved with a trilogy of movies (and director G. W. Pabst on two of them) starting with PANDORA's BOX in Germany and culminating in France with PRIX DE BEAUTE, each considered essentials in her all-too-brief body of work. DIARY OF A LOST GIRL is the second collaboration between Brooks and Pabst and it's hard to point which one of the two is visually stronger. Both contain elements of strong German Expressionism. Although, where the former was drenched in dark images, the latter had a more cerebral darkness closer to the moral fabric of Margarethe Bohme's sordid story.

It's also hard to say in which one of the two Pabst films Louise Brooks looks better because in both she has extremely modulated performances way ahead of her time, dismissed when they were released, re-discovered over the years. Where in PANDORA'S BOX Brooks had that one remarkable scene where she seduces the doctor who's taken her in as the doctor's son walks in on them, rendering her sensuality to that of a cool, Goth dominatrix thirty years before Bettie Page, in DIARY, as the innocent Thymiane Henning, she's seen as a virginal survivor. Clearly, the camera loves here even more here as her dark looks give way to an ethereal beauty looking for her inner woman while a world filled with dark people threaten to quench her light out.

It becomes an outrage of almost mythical proportions when Thymiane falls from grace due to actions outside of her control; in searching for the truth as to why a beloved maid has decided to leave the house she falls into the sexual trap of her father's assistant, Meinhert. Nine months later she gives birth to a child, but because she refuses to marry Meinhert she is sent to a reform school where she is stripped of her elegance and forced to become an automaton under the uber-strict, iron hand of both Directors of the reform school. There she also befriends another girl, Erika, with whose help she escapes. Going back home proves fruitless -- she learns her child has died. Having nothing to hold on to, she tracks down her friend Erika who is now working in a brothel for a madam.

It's here where life warms up to Thymiane as she slowly joins the land of the living. However, an encounter with her family leads to heartbreak when they see what she has become. Even so, she marries into wealth (as her father dies and leaves her nothing and Meinhert tries one last time to trick her into coming back home), and is finally able to help the other girls who still live in oppression at the reform school as she denounces its evils.

DIARY OF A LOST GIRL is all but a dark affair. Despite the lurid elements of the story, it's extremely compassionate as heard by the near-ambient score, and those close ups where Louise Brooks' transcendent face fills the screen and serenely communicates a myriad of emotions at key scenes differentiate it from PANDORA'S BOX, where Brook's Lulu was always seen in shadows and was essentially a fallen woman spiralling down into tragedy. For the time it was considered scandalous and erotic -- if anything, its eroticism is implied more than seen. The scene where Meinhert seduces Thymiane is charged with a huge amount of electricity, as is the scene when the stern headmistress is banging her drum to a beat she only knows as the girls exercise. Hers is an ugly performance, typical of predatory lesbians preying on girls they can't have, and it's one that can't be (unfairly) considered stereotypical.

Time has proved to be kind to the Pabst's masterpiece. Storywise, it's still contemporary in many ways -- it's no different than the story of PALINDROMES in spirit. There are moments of weirdness, such as when Thymiane drinks liquor at the brothel and gets loose as the clients and other prostitutes watch, or the bizarre exchange between Thymiane and her male client. The delicacy in which the darker aspects of the story are handled elevate it from being a merely exploitative film, and there is one haunting moment when a male client tells Thymiane, "We're all lost." It's a tender scene of solidarity within a world that only sees such woman as tainted and men as lecherous. A historic movie that should be discovered by people looking to find the roots of subtle acting and subdued drama.

Twice in DIARY OF A LOST GIRL naive young Thymian (Louise Brooks) is raped after passing out - that is, stone cold unconscious for a lonnnngggg time - while being held in the arms of a man (first while conversing and second on the dance floor after drinking one glass of beer). This is too much! Was it perhaps considered normal in those days for sweet young things to faint dead away while in men's arms? I doubt it - even in D.W. Griffith films. Brooks, a stunner if there ever there was one, looks as if she could chew up these men and spit them out, which she sort of does by the finale. Fritz Rasp, as the first rapist, plays a character similar to his White Russian agent in Pabst's THE LOVE OF JEANNE NEY (1927) - a man so repellent that no decent person would want to spend one minute in his presence. German cabaret artist Valeska Gert is memorable as the sadistic headmistress of the kind of reform school we would expect to encounter in "Our Gang" comedies, Oliver Twist dramatizations or Max Fleischer cartoons (the children are forced to lift spoonfuls of gruel to their mouths in time to a beating drum). The camera devours Gert's bald, brutish husband (Andrews Engelmann) at length as he curls his lips into a sickly smile, to make absolutely sure we see what an evil reptile he is. For a film about a "diary," one wishes that the screen time devoted to the heroine's actually writing in it were one tenth as long as villains' closeups.

I was assured that "Diary of a Lost Girl" was more accessible than "Pandora's Box"; it is. This is much more a straightforward human narrative than an attempt at representing archetype, and there is also less presumption that we are already familiar with the subject matter: it does not require so much intense concentration just to keep up. In addition, there are a greater number of sympathetic characters -- which is to say that there are some!

However, the notorious Louise Brooks still did not come across to me as being a good actress. In fact, if anything I felt that her performance here was more stilted than in "Pandora's Box", where from time to time I was actually impressed. She is far too obviously sophisticated for the early scenes of a teenage Thymian -- Brooks is no Mary Pickford -- and although she is more convincing as a workhouse rebel, I found myself frequently feeling that the actress was simply a beat behind the action; standing there waiting for an off-screen voice to tell her how to move or react, rather than inhabiting the character within the world of the film. Contemporary critics called her acting for Pabst "wooden", and to this viewer all too often she comes across as a beautiful waxen doll, expressing at best one emotion per scene -- these pictures do not represent her best work.

Nonetheless as a whole the film held my interest and was entertaining. (It was frightfully convenient the way that Thymian would faint whenever she was on the point of sexual congress, however... thus enabling her to be presented as the most innocent of 'fallen women'!) Perhaps the most effective are the rigidly synchronised and choreographed scenes in the workhouse -- to an English audience inevitably reminiscent of "Oliver Twist" -- followed by the girls' final rebellion, which was the first point at which the picture really began to engage me emotionally. (I was somewhat disappointed to discover at the end of the film that the rebellion had apparently had no long-lasting effect; even the same superintendent was still in charge.) I actually cared about what happened to Thymian and her circle, which made a pleasant change.

That final title, though..! I can only assume it's not quite so thumpingly preachy and obvious in the original German; it completely broke up the mood of the scene for me, and thus detracted from the whole end of the film. Someone clearly didn't have faith in the actors' presentation, and felt the need to drive the moral home with a sledge-hammer.

I love this film because the authenticity of emotion comes through virtually all the characters. I first saw it on the big screen when I was 22, about the same age that Louise Brooks was when she starred in the film. There was something so simple about it that really reached the emotional core of the story--the loss of the relationship between a father and daughter. I easily identified with the daughter character--and who wouldn't want to identify with the most beautiful woman you'd ever seen (I still think that). The injustice she endured changed her from a vulnerable happy-go-lucky girl into a hardhearted survivor. My life followed a similar course and at the time I first saw it, I was a heavy drinker and drug user, plus it was the beginning of the end of my relationship with my dad. If you have father-child issues this movie may be as cathartic for you as it was for me. One caveat when watching silent films--you have to remember how long ago they were made; they may seem laughable because they're so different, and some of the acting is exaggerated because not long before film began, all acting was done on the stage and had to be "read" at the back of the house. I admit there are some corny overtones, but on the whole it's a great work of art and gorgeous to look at--just like Louise.

I had never seen a Louise Brooks or Valeska Gert film before. I thought this one was very good. The plot is basic but the atmosphere is what makes this movie--very slow, deliberate, lots of long close-ups, and a pairing of repression and hysteria, all in 1929. The print I saw was mostly a French one; perhaps no complete print now exists? I saw this film as part of a special series, which included a talk afterward. The speaker said that the ending was imposed by the censors--Pabst wanted one in which Thymiane returns to the brothel and takes it over. My favorite scene was the one in the reformatory, in which Valeska Gert bangs the gong.

A young, upperclass woman named Thymian is excised from her family when a combination of incidents including her father's affair with the housekeeper, the death of the governess, and her rape by her father's business partner resulting in impregnation causes the family as a whole to send her away (for various reasons, some of which are unknown) to a reformatory. The draconian actions of the reformatory cause her to run away with a young Count, but unfortunately he is penniless and they have nowhere to go, so she gets stuck in a brothel of sorts where she lives until circumstances bring her back to her family and eventually lead her to a new life and new identity, from which she learns compassion for the other "lost girls" of the world.

Technically, that's what it's about.

At least, that's what happens. The problem with this film is that Thymian is the only character with any motivation, and it's a slight and unfocused one at that. For the first half of the film, indeed, one at least can be forgiving to the film because the characters inherent (and physical) beauty at least provides some sort of motion to the storyline. Unfortunately, since the characters have no motivation, and since the director seems entirely unwilling to let anything tragic have its due in the world, the movie skips past what could possibly be a beautiful and tragic ending and continues for another hour or so on tangents without importance or design.

At first this discursiveness seems rather stunning and unexpected, but a quick look back over a few points of the first half of the film start revealing that indeed, it seems Pabst really didn't have a clear understanding of overaching tones, themes, motifs. He has a storyline and names for characters, but no personalities or plot. For instance, the name of this movie: DIARY of a Lost Girl. The beginning is quite clear and obvious the importance of the diary to the character of Thymian, but not only does it not sustain its direct duty to bring her some form of closure, revelation, or salvation, it also simply disappears after a certain point and is never heard of again.

Furthermore, the movie strives to close up all threads with an opportunistic idea that everything can work out, but it closes up threads that needn't be included or are even merely incidental in the story arch. I repeat: the characters lack motivation. Since the characters lack motivation, what are they supposed to do to win, or lose, or react to events? They have nowhere to go or expand, and thus the ending keeps getting further and further away.

Most distressing about watching this film is it's complete lack of understanding about tone. It goes to extremes that seem at first to show the incredible level of conformity, decadence, ignorance, or whatever, but eventually go to far and fail to make an organized statement. Little nods to lesbianism are included for no real reason whatsoever. And what about Thymian's tendency to pass out before being taken advantage of? If it's meant to show her lack of control over the situation, it's a very maudlin and over-indulgent attempt.

In fact, why does Thymian want to hide the identity of the father of her baby when she was quite clearly raped? Some rape victims tend to victimize themselves by claiming that they deserved it, but there's no hint, nod, or involvement of that dysfunction. Why does the mistress of the reformatory derive such pleasure at the exercise of the girls? There's no clear evidence to support that she's sadistic, lesbian, or any has any form of motivation besides the fact that showing her wild grinning face seems a good way to get a reaction from the audience. Why is the housekeeper turned stepmother so stern, and furthermore, why can't she seem to make any face other than her one stern one? Sometimes this film goes to lengths, also, to go further into depth about things that don't deserve such treatment. Most of the ending seems to be an attempt by the filmmakers to take control of the theme (which they don't have) by reintroducing arbitrary characters and involving them in entirely new plot lines that don't have any coherent or enthused meaning on the overall storyarch. Basically, as soon as the Count's son inexplicably kills himself, the movie becomes saturated with false pretensions towards positivity, endurance, and "love" without taking the time to admit that the entire movie has already ended.

From there, the whole thing begins to fall entirely out of control and gets worse and worse until roughly about the beach scene and beyond, which if by that point you're still paying attention and caring about where the characters are going, you're just going to be lead to one of the most antithetical climaxes in film history. Yes, the Count actually said that line, and yes, that's all you're left with.

--PolarisDiB