The Divine Woman

Marianne, raised in the provinces and abandoned by her mother, goes to Paris and becomes a star on the stage. The more famous she grows, the further she moves from the soldier she loves. In the end she has to choose between her career and the man. The film is not interested in fame. It is interested in the choice itself: it presses the woman between staying on stage and loving, and, in the habit of the period, makes her pick a side. The starting point is accounts of Sarah Bernhardt's youth. The form is silent-era MGM: wide stage sets, dressing rooms, Paris streets. Victor Sjöström applies the sense of light he brought from Sweden at studio scale. What actually makes the film significant is that we do not have it. This is the only largely lost Greta Garbo film; one of its eight reels, about nine and a half minutes, was found at the Gosfilmofond archive in Moscow in 1993, and the reel that survived is the shortest. The American Film Institute counts it among the ten most important lost films of the silent era. Garbo plays Marianne and Lars Hanson the soldier. Who it is for: viewers curious about silent film history and early Garbo. Who it is not for: anyone hoping to watch it. There is no film to watch, only a fragment of under ten minutes.