Film review

  • Ninotchka

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ernst Lubitsch (1939)

    Ninotchka is uneven and can be uncomfortable, but one terrific part lasts long enough to transcend the film’s defects and banish a viewer’s doubts.  Made just before the start of World War II in Europe, Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedy reached American cinemas a few weeks after war broke out, with a premiere in early October 1939 and general release the following month – hence the hasty addition of roguish explanatory text on screen before the action gets underway:  ‘This picture takes place in Paris in those wonderful days when a siren was a brunette… and if a Frenchman turned out the light, it was not on account of an air raid!’

    Buljanoff (Felix Bressart), Iranoff (Sig Ruman), and Kopalski (Alexander Granach), representatives of the Soviet Board of Trade, arrive in the French capital to sell jewels confiscated from their aristocratic owner by the Bolshevik government, following the 1917 Revolution.  The trio urgently debates the pros and cons of staying in the luxury Hotel Clarence’s ‘royal suite’; winning this fight with political conscience, they settle in there.  Alexis Rakonin (Gregory Gaye), a White Russian with a menial job at the hotel, eavesdrops on the visitors’ conversation about their mission in the city.  Count Rakonin, as he once was, immediately informs a fellow White Russian, the Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire), that her family jewels have come to Paris.  Swana hasn’t been reduced to working for a living and is keen to maintain her privileged lifestyle.  Her current lover, French aristocrat Count Léon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas), comes to the royal suite to inform the Russian envoys and Mercier (Edwin Maxwell), the Parisian jeweller to whom they’re planning to sell, that a petition has been filed to prevent the jewels going anywhere.  The count’s even more effective tactic is to get Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski drunk over a long and lavish lunch; he then sends a telegram on their behalf to Razinin, the envoys’ boss in Moscow, proposing a compromise re the jewels.  In angry response, Razinin dispatches a special envoy to Paris to sort things out – Nina Ivanovna ‘Ninotchka’ Yakushova (Greta Garbo).  Ninotchka is ruthlessly efficient, unyielding and, most conspicuously, unsmiling.  Until she meets Léon d’Algout, and they fall in love.

    Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski assume their senior colleague, coming to Paris by train, will be a man.  They’ve no idea what he looks like and buzz around a busy station platform trying to pick him out.  ‘He looks like a comrade!’, decides Buljanoff, until the man in question gives a Nazi salute to the person he’s meeting.  If that provokes a sharp intake of breath – though it’s nothing compared with To Be or Not to Be, which Lubitsch made three years later – Ninotchka‘s comedy treatment of the Soviet system makes for more protracted unease.  It’s one thing doing jokes about five-year plans and dowdy outfits, another getting laughs from the envoys’ fears of exile to Siberia (never mind that happened in Tsarist Russia as well as during the communist era).  You sometimes laugh despite yourself, as when Ninotchka and Léon return to her hotel suite and indulge in a firing squad pantomime.  Both are already intoxicated, champagne virgin Ninotchka especially so; tying a napkin over her face, Léon opens another bottle of champagne, and she slumps to the ground when the cork pops.  The scene is redeemed by a lovely grace note – before he opens the bottle, Léon pauses and briefly lifts Ninotchka’s blindfold to kiss her.

    Plenty of contributors, on both sides of the camera, had emigrated from Europe to the US.  Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, who wrote the screenplay with American-born Charles Brackett, were Jewish escapees from Nazi Germany – ditto Felix Bressart and Alexander Granach.  The latter’s escape route was via the Soviet Union; whereas Gregory Gaye really was a White Russian.  Others, like Lubitsch himself and Melchior Lyengel (who receives the story credit), though Jewish, came to Hollywood before the Nazi era, while Bela Lugosi (who eventually appears as Razinin) and Sig Ruman – not to mention Garbo herself – had Christian upbringings in Europe.  Despite this intriguing mix of backgrounds, Ninotchka is smug about the nonsense of communism and the superiority of capitalism.  (It’s striking to reflect that the Great Depression was barely over and that, within a few years, Hollywood would be Red Scare-riven.)  With Léon, Swana and minor French characters played by born-and-bred Americans, there’s also a persistent whiff of Hollywood cultural imperialism in the air.

    None of this stops Ninotchka from being enjoyable.  At first, the comedy is more pleasingly accomplished than laugh out loud:  the envoys’ arrival at the swanky hotel; debonair Léon’s opening scene with vain, self-centred Swana; the Russians’ lunch with Léon.  (It takes place behind closed doors; the comings-and-goings of short-skirted waitresses and the sounds of increasing merriment from inside the royal suite signal the fun being had.)  These preparatory scenes last a bit too long and it’s a relief when Ninotchka arrives on the scene.  From the point at which she and Léon first meet on a Paris street – each unaware of who the other is – the film takes off.  Nothing has prepared you for the sheer delight of the first evening that the formidably logical apparatchik and the affably hedonistic aristo spend together, at the Eiffel Tower, then at his apartment.  She relentlessly disparages his moribund culture and takes to pieces silly ideas of romantic love.  A self-described ‘tiny cog in the great wheel of evolution’, Ninotchka succeeds only in enchanting her companion – ‘You’re the most adorable cog I ever saw in my life’.  For her part, though insisting that love is just ‘a biological, or shall we say chemical, process’, she concedes that ‘chemically, we are already quite sympathetic’ and even goes so far as to tell Léon that ‘his general appearance is not distasteful’.  Then, shortly after midnight, he takes a telephone call from Buljanoff.  Léon and Ninotchka realise who they’ve been with for the past few hours.  Despite his protests, she brusquely leaves his apartment, to get back to the job in hand.

    Greta Garbo is splendid – really funny – as the poker-faced Ninotchka, and Melvyn Douglas a perfect comic partner.  The impetus is sustained all the way through to lunchtime the next day.  Not to be deterred, Léon follows Comrade Yakushova to a working-men’s bistro, pretending to be a regular there – not that Ninotchka is fooled.  He sits himself down at her table and tries to improve her mood by telling her jokes.  Her face doesn’t crack, even though one of the jokes is pretty good.  A group of men at a neighbouring table laugh loudly at it, but not as loudly as when Léon leans too far back in his chair, and crashes to the floor.  Ninotchka, too, finds this hilarious.  Garbo’s laughter, a legendary screen moment, is pivotal in the pair’s romance.  It’s also a turning point in Ninotchka in perhaps less intended ways.

    ‘Dying is easy, comedy is hard’ … it maybe follows from that well-known acting maxim that crying is easy, laughing is hard.  The immediate problem when ‘Garbo Laughs!’ is that you don’t believe her.  According to Pauline Kael, there’s ‘a widespread story that when the time came for her laughing scene [Garbo] pantomimed laughter beautifully, but no sound emerged; it was later provided by someone anonymous’.  Whatever the reason, the effect is oddly unnatural.  (Melvyn Douglas’s switch to mirth is, despite Léon’s spectacular loss of dignity, more convincing.  Léon is embarrassed and annoyed by Ninotchka’s reaction, before joining in the laughter with gusto.)  The turning point results in a longer-term problem, too.  When Ninotchka cracks up, Lubitsch clearly means the moment to express the ending of her resistance to Léon.  The trouble is, Greta Garbo is too ready to revert to what she usually did and was celebrated for – too eager to go into woman-in-love self-surrender mode.  On one level, this makes sense because the role here is so much about the star herself.  Ninotchka’s humour bypass corresponds to Garbo’s reputation as an unsurpassed screen tragedienne; there’s more than one reference in the Ninotchka script to wanting to be alone.  On another level, though, the film seems to deflate from this point on – and Garbo’s characterisation is made to seem lacking.

    Still, although Ninotchka never quite recovers the momentum of that earlier passage, there are lots of good bits to come, as the heroine thaws and is seduced by French champagne and couture, as well as charmed by Léon.   (Garbo’s wardrobe is, as usual, designed by Adrian.  It includes a memorably ridiculous ‘chic’ hat that Ninotchka first deplores, then sets her heart on and buys.  It’s a blessing when she takes it off.)  There’s a fine caustic exchange between the leading lady and Swana, who proves more anxious to get rid of Ninotchka than to get back her jewels, though she does the latter to achieve the former – and to get Léon back, too.  During the night, Rakonin swipes the jewels from Ninotchka’s hotel room, where Swana arrives next afternoon to propose to her champagne-hungover love rival another compromise:  Swana will hand the jewellery over provided that Ninotchka is on the next flight back to Moscow.  Ninotchka, after selling the jewels to Mercier, reluctantly does just that.

    Greta Garbo, a good actress who became a great movie star, is an icon partly because her screen career didn’t last long.  She made a good few Hollywood films (Ninotchka was the last but one) but over a period of only fifteen years:  because audiences didn’t see her age significantly, Garbo’s image is preserved in amber as well as celluloid.  Melvyn Douglas’s stage and screen career lasted more than half a century.  He never seemed to go out of fashion but was never a star.  Although he had plenty of lead roles, Douglas remained essentially a character actor – which shows to great advantage in Ninotchka.  He’s able to negotiate the character shifts dictated by the story more easily than Greta Garbo.  His Léon is funny and charming in his own right, but Douglas also knows his place:  he never tries to upstage Garbo.  When Ninotchka and Léon first arrive at his apartment, they’re welcomed by his elderly butler, Gaston (Richard Carle).  Ninotchka, observing that Gaston is ‘horribly old’ and ‘looks sad’ (he doesn’t), scolds Léon – ‘You should not make him work’ – and asks, ‘Do you whip him?’  Léon replies, ‘No, though the mere thought makes my mouth water’.  Melvyn Douglas’s beautifully straight delivery of that line epitomises the quality of his performance throughout.

    You can guess from her acting style that Ina Claire was renowned for her work on stage rather than screen, but her theatricality as Swana is good value.  A little of Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski goes quite a long way:  Ernst Lubitsch does well to ration their screen time.  Once they and Ninotchka are back in the USSR, the film is marking time (and the jokey military parade celebrating Stalin is another episode that’s retrospectively hard to smile at).  But this is also partly testament to the success of the film’s central romance – you’re impatient for Léon to reappear and give Ninotchka and himself the ending they deserve and we want for them.  The three clueless envoys end up in Constantinople; Commissar Razinin dispatches Ninotchka there to rescue their latest trading failure.  On arrival, she discovers they’re now running their own restaurant, trading for personal profit rather than Mother Russia’s.  When Ninotchka demands to know who’s behind this disgraceful dereliction of duty, Léon returns to the screen.  Denied a visa to enter the Soviet Union, he decided to make alternative arrangements to see Ninotchka again, conspiring with the biddable Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski to do so.  Léon asks her to stay with him and out of her homeland for good.  ‘When it is a choice between my personal interest and the good of my country, how can I waver?’ she replies, ‘No one shall say Ninotchka was a bad Russian’.  She then promptly joins Léon in a conclusive clinch.  It’s a nifty ending – the West has won, communism is vanquished, Ninotchka and Léon are a happy couple.  Which left this viewer happy, too.

    3 June 2026

  • Pan’s Labyrinth

    Old YorkerFilm review

    El laberinto del fauno

    Guillermo del Toro (2006)

    Spain, 1944.  The Civil War ended five years previously but text on the screen explains that ‘Hidden in the mountains, armed men fight the new Fascist regime.  Military posts are established to exterminate the Resistance’.  Almost immediately, a voiceover starts to tell of a different once-upon-a-time.  In the underworld, a realm ‘where there are no lies or pain’, the king’s daughter dreamed of daylight and blue skies.  She escaped to the world above ground, where light blinded her and erased her memory.  The princess became sick and died, but the king knew his daughter would eventually return to the underworld, in another body, at another time.  Next, ten-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is travelling with her heavily pregnant mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), to Navarra, near the Spanish border with France, and a military outpost headed by the Falangist Captain Vidal (Sergi López), who is also Ofelia’s new stepfather.  As their sedan car approaches its destination, the child has her nose in a book of fairytales; Carmen affectionately chides Ofelia, ‘You’re too old to be filling your head with such nonsense’.  But Pan’s Labyrinth’s audience already knows better.

    Even before telling the story of the princess, writer-director Guillermo del Toro has shown the distressing image of a young girl on the ground, her face fearful, blood streaming from her nose.  The image is no less distressing for the accompaniment of a sweetly sung lullaby; it’s transformed when we realise that the blood is gradually retreating into the child’s nostril until all trace of it has disappeared.  With the voiceover preparing to conclude the tale of the underworld princess, del Toro’s camera tours a landscape of ruins – bombed-out buildings, half-demolished walls with posters declaring the triumph of Francoism, empty shoes, broken spectacles.  As we see the child reading her book, we recognise Ofelia as the stricken girl with the surreal nosebleed.  Before she and her mother reach the military outpost, they make a brief stop because Carmen is feeling ill.  While the soldiers escorting them to Navarra get water for her mother, Ofelia wanders off from the car towards a forest that runs alongside the road.  She finds a piece of stone, on which the outline of a human eye is carved.  Entering the decidedly mysterious forest (tangled tree roots, heavy mist), she comes upon a stone monolith topped by a grotesque face, mouth wide open, one eye missing.  Ofelia puts the piece of stone she found into the gap in the statue’s face, where it fits neatly.  A huge stick insect emerges from the gaping mouth and, morphing into a fairy, leads Ofelia into a stone labyrinth.  The sound of Carmen’s voice, calling her daughter, scares away the stick insect/fairy guide and Ofelia rejoins her mother, to resume and complete their journey.  These elements link the reality of 1940s Spain with fantastical worlds – a link on which Pan’s Labyrinth crucially depends throughout.  For me, it’s sustained in mainly negative ways.  I think the towering reputation of del Toro’s film is undeserved.

    I saw Pan’s Labyrinth on its original release, but I hadn’t watched it again until now.  My chief recollection from the first viewing – that Sergi López’s Vidal upstaged the phantasmagoria – was certainly confirmed this second time around, but López’s dominance epitomises what’s wrong with the film more largely.  There’s a broad consensus that the Franco regime in Spain was an oppressive patriarchy so it’s fitting that del Toro substitutes a wicked stepfather for the wicked stepmother tradition in fairytales.  In political and/or historical screen drama depicting a violent totalitarian or authoritarian regime, it’s conventional for a single brutal psychopath to represent the evils of the regime as a means of streamlining the narrative, and that’s the case in Pan’s Labyrinth.  Although Vidal’s henchmen do commit acts of violence, they are, with the partial exception of Garcés (Manolo Solo), anonymous figures.  López’s portrait of Vidal, on the other hand, is a brilliant fusion of symbolic power and persuasive human detail.  He repeatedly has you thinking, if looks could kill – but those looks are achieved with remarkable economy.  López radiates such menace that you’re apprehensive even when Vidal, with a cutthroat razor to hand, is shaving himself.  The handsome captain is pathologically precise in his personal grooming and obsessed with the pocket watch he inherited from his father.  Forever winding the watch and checking its inner workings, Vidal is immediately irritated by Carmen and Ofelia’s delayed arrival in Navarra.   When Doctor Ferreiro (Álex Angulo) ventures the opinion that fragile Carmen shouldn’t have travelled at such an advanced stage of her pregnancy, Vidal, the ultimate patriarchalist, retorts that ‘A boy should be born wherever his father is.’  His arrogant assumption that the child will be a son proves to be correct.

    But though the power of Sergi López’s performance consists largely in internalising his character’s viciousness, this isn’t always withheld.  It first bursts out when Vidal murders two rabbit poachers, a father and son, under the mistaken impression that they’re Maquis rebels.  He smashes the younger man’s face with a glass bottle, shoots dead the protesting father, shoots again to finish off the son.  These moments of real sadistic violence eclipse del Toro’s fairy story, for all the ingenious and bizarre visual design of its setting.  The story is well enough worked out.  The lost princess’s father built many labyrinths – portals from the overworld to the underworld – to enable his daughter’s eventual journey home.  The labyrinth to which Ofelia repeatedly returns is guarded by a scary-looking faun, easily roused to anger.  (The faun has a body concealing Doug Jones, who would later incarnate the creature in del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017), and is voiced by Pablo Adán, who also supplies the film’s opening voiceover.)   The faun sets Ofelia three tasks, to be completed before the approaching full moon.  To carry out the tasks, the girl must consult a book whose pages are blank until helpful pictures magically appear on them.  All this beguiling stuff is lightweight, though, when juxtaposed with fascist savagery.

    The Shape of Water is far from a great film, but del Toro does succeed there in interweaving the real and fantastic aspects of his story.  In Pan’s Labyrinth, they play out virtually in parallel.  They intersect only through Ofelia’s presence in them both and on the rare occasions that del Toro’s imagery in the phantasmagorical world symbolises reality.  The first of Ofelia’s three tasks is to retrieve a golden key from the belly of a monstrously bloated toad, which dwells in the roots of a fig tree whose growth the squatter stifles:  the twisted, uterus-shaped fig tree represents pregnant Carmen’s plight as well as the state of the nation.  Ofelia feeds the toad magic stones that look just like the bugs that are its normal diet; the stones cause the toad to swell to an even greater size before it vomits the revolting mass and contents of its stomach, including the key.  Otherwise, if the film’s two worlds sometimes seem to have equal weight, it’s only because the real-world half, despite shocking bits, is limited by workaday plotting.  It’s obvious from the start that Carmen won’t survive giving birth to Vidal’s child, that mild-mannered Doctor Ferreiro and Vidal’s housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdú) are secret Maquis sympathisers.  Mercedes’ brother Pedro (Roger Casamayor) is the guerrillas’ ringleader.)  It’s obvious as soon as del Toro focuses on the kitchen knife that Mercedes secretes in her apron, that this will come in handy as a weapon:  in due course, the knife does to Vidal’s face what that cutthroat razor has always threatened to do.  And there’s plenty more in Pan’s Labyrinth that’s unsurprising – including most of the performances and Javier Navarrete’s eerie-uplifting music.

    31 May 2026

Posts navigation