Garbo: Where Did You Go?

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!

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.

A few interesting facts and movie clips.

The documentary basically focused on everything we already know about Garbo and did little to delve into the deeper mystique of the woman and give us insight into the Garbo that was out of circulation for 50 years. Additionally, I found these things problematic:

-- The "voice of Greta" reading her letters sounded like a character out of Downton Abbey rather than a shy Swede.... totally misses that low husky sound.

-- There is a woman with a mask that keeps appearing in the film --- with the mask hiding her and then at times giving a glimpse of the real life. I suppose there is symbolism there with the real Garbo hiding from the public... but the mask is so creepy and so distracting, that I had to quit watching and just listen.

-- The actress billed as "the investigator" consistently interrupts at inopportune moments and is perhaps more distracting than the creepy mask.

Overall, not well-produced and a big let down. Don't invest the 90 minutes. You could tune into a TCM Garbo movie and hear a Ben Mankiewicz pre-film summary that would give you the same level of information (and you could actually watch him and not be creeped out).

Disappointed. The Garbo mask scenes did nothing for this biography. They were distracting. The narrator was annoying. I'm not sure if she escaped from a mime college to exert her annoyingly stilted lines. I'm also not sure if her hair was supposed to be Garboesque. Made it through half the documentary then put the speed on 1.5. There isn't enough Garbo and there is too much of the mask and the mime. Garbo was alive when I was a kid. She'd show up in a news shot or film on occasion. So she didn't disappear. She out right stated she'd had it with Hollywood. Better to watch a film like Ninotchka to see how Garbo shone.

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 ?