Ninotchka

Early last Sunday morning, I watched a few minutes of “Ninotchka,” one of my favorite movies. I just love Greta Garbo’s performance in this movie. It’s so hard to reconcile Ninotchka with the Garbo of popular myth--the forbidding, unapproachable, unsmiling Swede who famously wanted to be alone. The movie poster for Ninotchka reads “Garbo Laughs!” because it was the first time moviegoers would see Greta Garbo as anything other than serious.

Garbo plays the lead character, Ninotchka Ivanovna Yakushova, an ambitious Soviet bureaucrat and party apparatchik. She is stern and earnestly dedicated, but full of wry cheer. Ninotchka is torn between her genuine commitment to the ideals of the Russian revolution and her honest and clear-eyed realization of its grim reality in practice. The political conflict is real and timely (“Ninotchka” was made in 1939, just as the worst of Stalin's purges were winding down) but it's also a metaphor for Ninotchka's personal conflict, between her desire to succeed in her work and her desire to be a happy woman. Ninotchka is resigned to the demands of life as a rising star of the Russian Communist party but she can't hide her love for life and people and her lively sense of humor, especially from Count Leon, played by Melvyn Douglas. He falls in love with her and she with him. Their only problem is the jealous Duchess Swana. And the vise grip of the party, of course.

Greta Garbo as Ninotchka with Melvyn Douglas as Count Leon.
Was there a more fun couple in any movie, ever?
No, there was not. 

"Ninotchka" is a comedy about the most serious of subjects. It was banned in the USSR and its satellite states, possibly for brilliant dialogue like this:

Buljanoff (the errant party apparatchik whom Ninotchka is sent to Paris to retrieve): How are things in Moscow? 

Ninotchka: Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.

Despite her determination to complete her assignment in Paris and return to Moscow, and her uncompromising dedication to the Revolution, Ninotchka falls in love with more than Count Leon. She falls in love with the beauty and joie de vivre of pre-war Paris. “I’m so happy,” she says. “Oh I'm so happy. No one can be so happy without being punished. I will be punished and I should be punished.” Ninotcha’s devotion to the Fatherland and her guilty love for Paris form just one of the movie’s love triangles. The other is between Ninotchka, Count Leon, and Grand Duchess Swana, a White Russian exile in Paris and Ninotchka’s rival for Leon’s affections. Ninotchka and Swana first meet at a Paris nightclub:

Grand Duchess Swana (commenting on Ninotchka’s elegant evening dress): Isn't it amazing? One gets the wrong impression of the new Russia. It must be charming. I'm delighted conditions have improved so. I assume this is what the factory workers wear at their dances?

Ninotchka: Exactly! You see, it would have been very embarrassing for people of my sort to wear low-cut gowns in the old Russia. The lashes of the Cossacks across our backs were not very becoming. And you know how vain women are.

Grand Duchess Swana : Yes. You're quite right about the Cossacks. We made a great mistake when we let them use their whips. They had such reliable guns.

Like everything else in “Ninotchka,” this conversation is about more than one thing. And like almost everything else in the movie, it is both modern and timeless. It’s a perfect verbal sparring match between two beautiful and brilliant women who both want the same man, and the political passive aggression makes it as relevant today as it was in 1939.

Political intrigue and aggression aside, "Ninotchka" ends happily because love wins over all. Given a choice, people prefer beauty and friendship and art and fun and laughter to ideology and dialectics and the vanguard of revolution. It’s 1939 again, and most of us prefer Paris to Moscow.