"The Sins of Love" is the second of Karel Lamac's films made available online from the Czech National Film Archive, and although only two pictures often isn't enough to recognize a pattern, much is shared between this and his other film, "White Paradise" (1924). Beyond the bland romances between young couples, both are tantalizingly reflexive and neither does much interesting with it. Oddly enough, in both this includes puppetry as performed by an older man serving in something of a supervisory capacity to the youths' love. Marionettes in the prior; sock puppets here. Moreover, in "White Paradise," there was a dream or vision multiple-exposure effect that was something of a film-within-the-film. This time, we get a play-within-play, and instead of the almost novelistic pacing (or at least that's what I called it) of the former film and its scenic setting, here we get melodrama and stage actors.
As is often the case, acting here is equated with infidelity, as the Juliet in this Shakespearean affair is married to another actor and an older one than the one she flirts with. Too bad the romance here is a bore, and for actors, they're awfully lousy liars when it comes to police questioning. The ending is well executed, though, and much of the misunderstanding of the melodrama is based on looks--the incomplete information characters gather from what they see. This suggestion of the illusion of what one sees itself is rather reflexive, although a director like Ernst Lubitsch could do a lot better with such material, including making the sex stuff fun. See "The Marriage Circle" (1924), "Lady Windermere's Fan" (1925), or "So This Is Paris" (1926), for early instances.
On another note, I'm afraid the scoring for these Czech films will be uniformly atrocious. As with the one provided for "White Paradise," I turned this one off--although I made it a third of the way through this time--and viewed it entirely silent. Laughably, the musicians claim their aim was for the music to resonate with the narrative and allow the viewer to focus on the film itself. No, you don't put together a bunch of distracting electronic static together with no relevance to the images if that's your intent. There are even musical and sound cues within the film, including some musical instrument playing early on, a record at a party, and car honking at the end, none of which this score bothers to recognize.
