★★★★★ This film was advertised as “La Garbo Ríe”, because the great actress did comedy. And she did it extraordinarily well. Ninotchka is one of the masterpieces of that genius of comic elegance that was Ernst Lubitsch, who was also a genius of political elegance. Here’s a Soviet agent traveling to Paris on a mission that doesn’t include falling in love with a capitalist, but hey, that’s emotions and feelings and the free market. Lubitsch destroys, without falling into fanaticism, the very idea of ideological blinders, of dogma, of militancy and replaces it with the (liberal) idea that everyone should be what they want and follow the dictates of their heart. He does it with dialogue of a sharpness that the showrunners of all the series today would like. That said, Garbo is pure panache because he always was. Never an overacted figure, always a modern and intelligent interpreter who, whom only the myth of the silent film lady knows, surprises with each performance. Here it is pure timing, a comedy lesson.
