Rent Shiraz (1928)

Animals and Passion - Shiraz review by CH

Astonishing to think that Shiraz (1928) was made almost a hundred years ago. Directed by a German, Frank Osten on location in India (to which he had moved), it has many interior shots of an Expressionist hue alongside those outside which, naturally lit, often find caravans of camels ambling by.

This is the background to a tale of an epic seventeenth-century love tangle. As a child, a princess is lost to the desert after a raid by brigands. She is found and rescued, to be brought up in a village where her new, eponymous brother falls in love with her. Alas, she is sold as a potential sex slave at market some years later. She is taken up by an Emperor who comes to love her but they cannot marry as she is apparently not royalty. Her grief-stricken brother watches from afar for eighteen years, and goes blind while events take a different turn within the Palace.

To summarise the story - and there is much more - is to miss the way in which the viewer become involved: the drama, the passion, the spectacle (there are many elephants). As so often in silent films, eyes are more than expressive, and the same can go for a kiss..

Now restored, partly with funding by George Harrison’s Estate, the film has a remarkable crispness, fittingly accompanied by Anouska Shankar’s new score. This is perfectly judged to savour all the intimate moments while carrying along a narrative which has soon shaken off any suggestion of the preposterous.

And this is not to reveal an ending which might yet take some by surprise.