In The Perfect Murder (Det Perfekte Mord),directed by Eva Isaksen, Anna-Lena Hemstrom believes herself to be Garbo,or rather the characters portrayed by Greta Garbo. During the making of a film, she enacts particular scenes from Garbo's films, in her bedroom before making love, the actress on the screen becoming the spectator within the film through an identification with the action of the film actress, the idealized appropriated into the dramaturgy of the erotic;her movements are those of Greta Garbo in character- the only way to become authentic is to be the absolute object of her look, and only then by being her paramour. Intringuingly, the fabula of the film, the events of each particular scene, and its syhuzet, the presentation of its plotline, merge as its characters encounter each other, as she entices each lover toward fantasy, toward the sensual. Visually, the film represents the act of love as being both abstract and concrete: it only depicts the actress during sex in as much as each instance, and the accompanying dialouge, is particularly connected to the narrative, there being a specificality within each of the scenes upon which the plotline is dependent, one in which the actress is convinced that she knows each of her lovers from a specific Greta Garbo film and that she has to make love to them according to the juncture of events that comprise the scene in the film. She is an actress entertaining the fantasies of the actress Greta Garbo and yet, although there are no abstract shots during the film, their being shown in the bedroom uninterruped by cut in shots that would add meaning to the scene, sex acquires something that is metaphoric in that she is Garbo and for each of her lovers it can only be fantasy, it becoming intangible at the very moment of sexual climax to where their very corporeality is unknowable, that in fact quite possibly known only by Garbo as well- there is an objectification of the actress as Garbo and it is her tragic beauty that has validity, her making love as the Garbo she has portrayed on the screen that carries her to the next lover from a different, later film of Greta Garbo, sex a metaphor for Garbo's elusiveness and her star quality. Early in the film Anna-Lena Hemstrom is in the role of an actress in the audience of the on-screen Greta Garbo, "How can one surrender oneself so completely." From there ,in a white bedroom and white nightgown symbolic of post-coital solitude, she introduces an eroticism of both reclusiveness and of sphinx-like mystery, of Garbo in character and only in character and of Anna-Lena Hemstrom as Greta, in character and only in character whispering, "Not now." "Not now." Mai Zetterling has said, "I don't have Garbo's austere tragic beauty." Just as the film establishes the narrative on two levels, that of the actress that can play a character on screen other than herself and invites the director of the film she is making to her apartment and that of the actress as Garbo in front of the camera, only known through the fulfillment of their being conjugal, Garbo herself was described by Nils Asther, who starred with her in Wild Orchids (Vilda orkideer, Sidney Franklin, 1929, eleven reels) and The Single Standard (En kvinnas moral, 1929, eight reels), as being shy, while Lon Chaney is quoted as having said, "I told Garbo that mystery served me well and it would do as much for her." Norma Shearer had said, "She was very cordial with me- and then, after clasping my hand, she was suddenly gone." In his Film Essays and Criticism, a valuable introduction to film theory, Rudolf Arnheim gives Greta Garbo only a two page "portait", but it is from 1928 and may be more than what is a cursory glance, his writing, "On cat's feet, her coat pulled tightly about her and her hands folded in her lap, Greta Garbo passes censorship." Arnheim sees Greta Garbo as erotic, as an erotic object. The Perfect Murder has been aired in the United States on The International Channel. Eva Isaksen newest film is currently being unspooled in Norway. Kerstin, a Swedish writer from Stockholm, was among the first of several Swedish bloggers to notice that Greta Garbo, the actress and the mystery, will be portrayed by Anna-Karin Eskilsson in the film Garbo, Svenska Dagbladet having announced during September of 2008 that the film, a biography, was slated to be lensed by Budd Bregman and screened to audiences during 2010. |