Garbo: Where Did You Go?

Only worth seeing for the clips of her silent movies and for the fact that there are so few documentaries on Greta Garbo (the TCM one being far superior to this) but overall this is very much a mixed bag and overall a bit of a mess.

The lumpy paper mache masks used to depict Garbo's head are truly grotesque. A very strange stylistic device for a woman who was universally known as the Divine One and feted for her staggering beauty during her lifetime. Could they have not used still photographs? Ultimately, the repetitive use of these masks throughout becomes a big bore.

Secondly the narration by Noomi Rapace is dull and vocally she sounds far too modern to convey the thoughts of Garbo's in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

The use of 'An Investigator' in a blonde Garboesque wig also adds nothing. A Louella Parsons or Hedda Hopper or even a Walter Winchell type may have been a better choice at representing the Hollywood of the time. Little to no mention of the Garbo mania of the 1930s or of Garbo's private life.

The good things are very few and far between: Some taped phone conversations from Sam Green, who was Garbo's walker; Scott Reisfield, representing Garbo's family; Mimi Pollak's daughter giving her opinion; and an interview snippet of Marlene Dietrich humbly declaring that nobody was Garbo's competitor, implying that no one at that level of fame or success in the 1930s.

Sadly it's a shame this documentary doesn't do Garbo any justice at all.

The actual documentary portiona of the film are excellent. In a huge Garbo devoté and I learned many things about her. But the bizarre and annoying conceit of the blonde wigged woman reading notes and repeatedly uncapping her pen is extremely annoying. Every time she shows up, balancing on her ballet slippers and reading notes im very annoyed!!! Her dialect and accent are so fake I can't stand it. She's completely affected and self aware and performative and it's truly awful. The actual footage is informative and well edited. I cannot imagine what they were thinking weaving the narrative with the wigged waif. Ugh!

Garbo: Where Did You Go? Should have been titled Garbo: Where Did the Point Go?

This documentary somehow takes one of the most enigmatic stars of Hollywood's Golden Age and turns her into a dull, meandering mystery with no payoff. It spends nearly an hour trudging through her childhood and early life with barely any coverage of her actual years as a global icon. The decision to use a paper mâché mask on a stand-in Garbo (who looked more like the Jigsaw puppet than the Swedish Sphinx) was mind boggling. Even worse were the bizarre gum-chewing interludes from a blonde woman whispering like she was filming an ASMR video in a Brooklyn loft. When the film finally addresses her retirement in the last 20 minutes, it offers no real insight...just the same tired refrain that she didn't want to be famous anymore.

No notable talking heads, no revelatory commentary, and no reason to watch. After suffering for almost an hour, I fast-forwarded just to get to the part that was supposed to matter-and even that was a letdown. A true waste of time.

And no, this review doesn't contain spoilers. Greta Garbo died when I was a year and a half old. If that's a spoiler, I'd like to speak to your history teacher.

The archival footage and the people who were interviewed and spoke about Garbo and her life were fantastic. However, the theatrics of the woman (presumably meant to be Garbo) wearing the freaky paper mache mask, were wildly unnecessary and frankly unpleasant. There were also a number of times where letters or quotes were read by the same voice but it was a conversation between two or more people. It was hard to follow who was supposed to be speaking. The Swedish "journalist" that tried to interview Garbo for decades was very unsettling, and it's never addressed. This man and his group essentially stalked her and then swooped in when she was elderly and vulnerable. The entirety of the documentary was based on the fact that she hated the attention that her fame attracted and yet this journalist man was almost part of the narrative.

Nothing on her lesbian crushes or relationships in NYC.

Her last unwitting film performance in Peter De Rome's artful gay porn movie, Adam and Yves in 1974 makes a brief apperance but no mention of the movie itself. Instead her NYC queer friends are presented as ultimatly disloyal and exploitative.

An apparent need to strighten the narrative seems unnecessary, resemebling the kind of closeted biography making that used to occur before the 1990s.

The director seemed unresolvedly torn between celebrating the cause celebe of an icon or revealing the person beneath and in the end the latter is side-stepped and compromised in favour of retaining an enigma. But for what ?