Portrait of Doriana Karenina I have a dream in which I dream. Russia, cold winter, snowstorm... What is the railway symbolism of Tolstoy - a sleigh with bells and three wide run. But the road is closed. In the inn, where Officer Vronsky leads Anna, a gypsy woman sings with a guitar.
Screenings of great novels always inspire fear - the plot and semantic volume is not mercilessly cut, many characters lose depth, the epic rhythm accelerates. And the more the Russian viewer is strange adaptation of Russian classics. How disturbing when the scene at the court lady Scherer is transferred, only for the sake of brevity, to the house of the Rostovs, the nobles are not of the highest rank! Where did half of the characters in Wajda's Demons go? The only thing that can balance the shrinking volume is a brilliant game. So Bert Lancaster, in a panoramic, but clearly insufficient against the background of Lampedusa’s novel, the film adaptation of Luchino Visconti’s “Leopard”, praised Prince Salina with his performance. But this does not always happen, it happens that both a wonderful actor and an Olympian director do not reach something other than illustrating the text, for example, remember Mastroiani in The Outsider of the same Lukino. However, the Garbo films are a topic of separate conversation. The text is unabashedly carved and shrugged, only to allow this cool elegance, this seemingly timid, chilling woman, to be more often in front of the viewer. She's certainly not Tolstoy's Anna. But she is Greta Garbo, and this, in cinematic conditions, we dare say, is equivalent.
In the pseudonym "Greta Garbo", taken by actress Gustafsson, a person familiar with Scandinavia, a hint of Ibsen's Gedda Gabler is heard. Provocative. This is not something you can easily think of. She doesn't wriggle a cat to lure men. She is always a refined victim, turning her face away, wrapping herself in squishy cloths, lifting her shoulders, hiding behind a high collar, averting her eyes, crossing her arms as if defending herself - and quite "inadvertently," inadvertently making advances to the one who craves them, powerfully subduing him. Achieving it, disenchanted men kill each other, make wild antics - Vronsky in Goulding's film falls from Froux at the races, being drunk. It is not fully self-controlling, it is amenable to circumstances, it is fatalistic and therefore fatal. In her, perhaps, it is possible - recalling the peculiarities of Lutheran views - to see a doomed, cursed woman, graceless. She brings suffering and suffers herself, but cannot escape the trap of her malleability. She is morbid not only in emphatically fragile, painful grace, she is morbid in her powerlessness before overwhelming emotion. Her passion is lawless. And not always for all the broken pots have to pay the cavaliers, as Austria will pay for the broken pots in the famous sharpness of the French politician. Her character is not criminal, but that she commits "worse crimes: it is a mistake" - since we are talking about French political bon mot.
There have been real epiphanies in cases of creative, overbearing reinterpretation of big text - say, Kurosawa's "The Idiot," which is itself being quoted as being reinterpreted in other films. But Goulding does not have such a power of directing: he composes a film from chamber scenes, alternating them only with the middle plans of a very average angle - in addition to the silent movie credits. Still. The American director has a few memorable characters of the second row - only the typical Grand Duke and Princess, Vronsky's patrons: this is not compared with an ensemble of more than a dozen silent characters, say, in Epstein's "action" "Mopra," about the same time filmed. And yet.
It is possible that from our distance, the films with Greta Garbo are seen as a separate genre, independent of the director, combining tragicomic and melodramatic features in decadent proportions. Vladimir Nabokov joked, calling the passage heroine of one novel "Doriana Karenina", with a hint of Garbo. Indeed, Dorian Karenina, like Wilde’s dandy and unlike Anna Karenina, does not begin to grow old and does not lose Vronsky’s love because of this. She is Doriana, also because, with all the desire to Russify the film almost kokoshnymi, Goulding, and most importantly - Garbo herself Europeanized the novel, which, again, evokes Kurosawa, boldly nipponized "Idiot" and achieved a completely new cinematic authenticity.
Garbo does not dissolve in his characters, or rather does not dissolve in them his main role. And you should not look at the interpretation of actress Gustafsson’s image of Anna Karenina, but at the stereotypical representation of actress Greta Garbo by actress Gustafsson. This is not the role of femme fatale, this is a very personal version of the role, thought out, refined, not reducible to some simple sum of analytically obvious terms. In the arithmetic action, something else is added that has not been "given." And the components themselves are not available to all even the primary film actresses. After all, there is already a chronological flavor: the “decrepit” times of chic modernity required to play not so much the character as the actor playing this role. This actor surrounded the viewer with the illusion of dreaming, dreaming, and the performed character was only one of the vague, flashing images of a dream. I have a dream in which I have a dream.
Let’s not talk about Gilbert’s creative work, it’s a big topic. Note: the connoisseur is happy with the artfully distinct cut of episodic images, at the caricature boundary, but only at the border - that attitude to them of silent cinema, which disappeared not immediately with the introduction of sound and then color, but somehow weathered. The sound and color allowed the viewer to focus on the central characters, shaded them with bright backs. Limited, simpler contrast and a limit on verbal material prompted a more conscientious study of mise-en-scene scenes with their minute screen, dream lives.
