This is a very bold film in it's storyline. It has a main female character who ends up in a life of crime and is exploited by many men eventually ended up in prostitution. Such a story is highly provocative for the content and how direct it is at showing the dark underbelly of human nature. The scene on the boat of her being sold to an Egyptian to work in his brothel to pay off her debts or face criminal prosecution and then having to resort to prostitution later on and being killed by Jack the Ripper are very bold moments. You can't help but be shocked by the audacity of the filmmakers to put something like this on the Silver Screen. The film is very challenging in that way and as I've said before about the 1920's, very much of it's time.
I would go so far as to say this film show's a desire of the 1920's to put women on the screen, leading ladies, who are not just romantic conquests or sidekicks like they will become in the early 1940's and into the 1950's but rather true leads who the story revolves around both in good and bad. This woman is a tragic figure who has horrible things happen to her and she is not a clearly good or bad person she is just depicted as human having both positive attributes as well as flaws. Lulu is a representation of a truly strong woman, unaltered by the veneer of film. She is both powerfully sexual and also sexually vulnerable.
I would argue this film shows the strength and willingness of the artists of the 1920's to truly explore human nature through film and put on screen highly provocative, highly damning and highly realistic portrayals of human suffering. This is a tendency that will be diminished and suppressed into the 1930's with the emergence of the Hays Code and a growing outrage towards "moral indecency" in the public sphere.