A Film Canon

 

 

This elegant comedy identifies the appreciation of female beauty as the common denominator between communist and capitalist, extrapolating a conversion narrative from it that turns on Stalinist envoy Ninotchka's (Greta Garbo) sojourn in Paris, where she attempts to sell, and then reclaim, jewels confiscated from the exiled Russian aristocracy. As a result, Ninotchka has two distinct incarnations, both of which possess their own comic charm. As the mercilessly plain-speaking mouthpiece of Stalinism, she proves memorably resistant to nuance, innuendo, or tone, in conspicuous contrast to Lubitsch's taste for comic euphemism, admittedly more truncated here than in many of his other works. Similarly, her obsessive need to analyse, measure and quantify makes for a subversive take on the City of Love, epitomised by her refusal to contemplate the Eiffel Tower as anything other than a technical phenomenon, fine dining as calories, or romance as chemistry. That said, this assertive frankness is so palpably phallic as to simply invert, rather than remove, the sexual dimension, as evinced in a kiss prefaced by her revelation of a bayonet wound, or her cold, quasi-masochistic form of address: "Your general appearance is not distasteful". As the converted capitalist - or at least sceptical communist - Ninotchka transforms the laugh into an art form, initially with her aristocratic lover, Leon (Melvyn Douglas), but most memorably with her clownish, credulous associates, Iranoff, Buljanoff, and Rakonin; the Three Stooges of Russian diplomacy. The strength of these two comic personae redeems the implausible transition from one to the other, as does the (relatively) nuanced Moscow sequence, and the subtle attention drawn to the similarities between the political systems.