I'm unfamiliar with the novel this Swedish silent production, "The Song of the Red Flower" or, for added alliteration, "Song of the Scarlet Flower," was based on, but reportedly it was Finnish author and playwright Johannes Linnankoski's most famous work, although apparently it's essentially just a Scandinavian Don Juan, a libertine who romances one woman after another, and if the purple prose in some of the title cards here is any indication, I'm none too interested in seeking it out. This Don Juan, too, as played by a young Lars Hanson, allegedly comes from a wealthy, farm-owning family (although the view we get inside their shack pales in comparison to a decent studio apartment two centuries later). He abandons his parents over his womanizing ways, though, and becomes a logger and general tramp. In contrived melodramatic and vaguely moralistic fashion, he'll inevitably learn the errors of his ways.
Dull stuff, but this is the golden age of Swedish silent cinema here, and that includes one of the two best directors from the period, Mauritz Stiller, being behind the camera, along with cinematographers Henrik Jaenzon and Ragnar Westfelt, and gorgeous Swedish scenery in front of it. Freshly restored by the Svenska Filminstitutet and tinted/toned, boring and implicitly classist morality tale or not, it always looks lovely. Appropriately, it sets its Don Juan tale in the countryside for the most part, with him only moving to the city for the chapter where he learns his lesson--y'know, city bad, country good, as usual in these things. Even in the city, where it always seems to be night, as opposed to the rural sunlight, the cinematography and production looks good, including some rain effects and low-key lighting. There's a terrific mirror scene, where Hanson gets into a heated exchange with his reflected doppelgänger.
It's in the idyllic farmland and rapids-adjacent logging areas where the picture is at its picturesque peak, though. It's no coincidence that the best of these Swedish silents tend to feature nature as a character for the human characters to confront in some spectacular fashion (Stiller's "Sir Arne's Treasure" (1919) or "Johan" (1921), e.g., or Victor Sjöström's "Terje Vigen" (1917) or "The Outlaw and His Wife" (1918)). Even the sex of this Don Juan narrative is mostly found in nature metaphors as opposed to explicit infidelities. Quite a lot of it is just based on looks--cutting between characters looking at each other, as the spectator admires the backgrounds. Otherwise, it becomes pretty obvious that they're not talking about literal flowers here, as in the plants. Ultimately, Hanson's protagonist falls in love with a flower-girl who refuses to hand out her roses to just any tramp.... Yeah, they're not talking about roses. And, to prove himself to her, in perhaps the most spectacular sequence of the film (aside from the brief apparent use of a stunt dummy and the fact that it can't quite compete with my unfairly having just watched "Our Hospitality" (1923), with its amazing climax, prior), he rides a phallic log down the wet waves of a river's rapids. In the city here, they just have booze and prostitutes, but these country folk seem to have been into some elaborate courtship rituals.
