A Film Canon

Camille clarifies Greta Garbo's peculiar proclivity for high melodrama in terms of her ability to embody both sides of the drastic dichotomies upon which it is predicated, imbuing it with an ambiguity that it doesn't usually possess. As nineteenth-century Parisian courtesan Marguerite Gautier, Garbo finds her emotional life positioned on a spectrum between laughing and coughing, partly because of her incorporation into a social mileu that values her primarily as a commodity - an object of gossip, flirtation and acquisition - rather than a subject, financing, rather than supporting, her existence. In this light, the bronchial disease from which she suffers possesses social and aesthetic dimensions, explaining why every surface in her claustrophobic apartment  - and, above all, its lush boudoir - takes on the silky, lacey reticulation of alveoli, such that even the most minute passages of wind - whether produced by ornamental fans, or registered by a proliferation of candelabras - exude a stagnant, sickly intensity. It's no coincidence that the one, crucial gift that her (relatively) penniless lover (Robert Taylor) can offer is the fresh air and open space of the countryside, nor that the central crisis is anticipated by a swarm of bees, set against a shimmering, translucent curtain, and topped off by a dress detailing a frozen flock of birds. All contribute to a pathologisation, or paralysis, of space, leaving Garbo in a self-defeating 'position', and ensuring that any expression of gaiety is simultaneously one of pain; or, alternatively, that the very beauty that defines her is frozen, turned violently against itself, most beautifully in her penultimate encounter with her ravaged body in a bedroom mirror.