Diary of a Lost Girl

G. W. Pabst’s second film with Louise Brooks (after Pandora’s Box) was ruthlessly attacked by the censors and suffered merciless cuts everywhere it was shown. The restoration of this fascinating film was an international effort involving many cooperating film archives. Brooks plays a pharmacist’s daughter, Thymiane, who bears a child out of wedlock and is shunted off to a home for delinquent girls while her seducer is kept on as her father’s assistant. She escapes and finds refuge in a brothel, where the madam’s compassion and the milieu of overt sexuality offer a striking contrast with the cruel hypocrisy of her bourgeois family.