Garbo: Where Did You Go?

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.

I love documentaries and was so excited to watch this and learn more about Garbo. This was extremely boring and provided mostly surface level information. More time was spent showing an actor holding a weird fake head in front of her own or flipping through papers than clips of Garbo. And yes, I understood the point of the fake head, I just found it an unnecessary waste of time. The film would touch on something quite briefly but wouldn't explore it deeper and would quickly move on. It left me constantly hoping for more but I was disappointed each time. Surely there is more information out there about a fascinating person like Garbo. Don't waste your time.

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.

It starts off with a ridiculous statement which says that "why she quit acting and where she went are a mystery to this day...." which was completely untrue. Everyone knows she lived in New York City and walked a lot. People saw her all over the city for years and years. Why she quit has also been well documented. So this slow moving, poorly narrated, idiotically stylized documentary teaches us nothing. Why is that woman in the blond wig reading papers while someone who sounds like Madonna using her fake British accent does a voice over? Why are the creepy papier machet masks necessary-symbolism? Wow, that's a high school play level plot device. The whole thing was off-putting, cringy, shallow and took away from the only decent parts, which was the interviews with people who knew her.

The people who were interviewed and the archived footage regarding Garbo were great. The use of the paper mache mask were creepy and unnecessary. Also unnerving was the platinum blonde actress who chewed through every seen she was in. Her acting was way over the top, and did nothing for the film. It appeared as though this documentary was the first professional job for the blonde and she wanted to make a good impression. She failed miserably.

I stopped watching about 3/4 of the way through the film because I couldn't take the mask and the platinum blonde anymore. I wish the film had been solely archival footage and interviews.