The first thing to be said about The Oyster Princess, from 1919, one of the films recently released in Kino's "Lubitsch In Berlin" series, is that there's little evidence in it of "the Lubitsch touch" -- that gossamer comedy of suggestion and indirection that came to characterize the director's mature style.
The Oyster Princess is very broad farce, verging on slapstick at times. That said, though, the film, for all its aggressive silliness, has remarkable stylistic assurance and consistency -- it's witty, charming and often very funny. What it resembles most closely are the operettas of Offenbach, or rather of his librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy, which manage to combine delirious frivolity with an edgy satire of aristocratic pretensions. The style is frothy and subversive at the same time.
The Oyster Princess has a preposterous plot, involving a marriage under false pretenses, and equally preposterous depictions of aristocratic dementia that often veer into the realms of the surreal. (In some ways they are lighter-hearted versions of Von Stroheim's dark and grotesque portrayals of these same aristocratic circles.) But there's more to it than that, just as there's more to Offenbach than his farcical plots -- there's Lubitsch's extraordinary cinematic imagination, which at times causes the film to soar into the same ethereal realms that Offenbach's music inhabits.
The wedding scene, for example, involves the sublime choreography of an army of servants in action, and an even more delirious set-piece in which the guests, and even the servants, break out in an hysterical episode of fox-trotting -- travesties of actual behavior organized with exhilarating plastic grace. The film transcends itself in these moments, just as Offenbach's melodies transcend their dramatic vehicles.
So if "the Lubitsch touch" isn't on display here, except in a few stray scenes, the Lubitsch genius explodes often enough to make us realize we are in the company of a master of the medium, even if he's a master still in search of a distinctive personal style.