The Kiss opens with an art gallery tour guide running comically fast past a row of paintings while the camera pans right to keep pace—then slows, and dips down, to Greta Garbo.
And Conrad Nagel, but who cares?
Garbo. Revealed in the opening minute of a film. Not for us, this time, the glory of a Garbo reveal, such as the one in Flesh and the Devil (1926) that shuddered my breastbone. Here we have the Sphinx from the start, upfront and kind of stressed, once again the object of a man’s obsession, but, in this case, well along in a sexless tryst behind the back of her older husband. Garbo is Irene Guarry, a French woman of means; Nagel is Ardré, a notable defense lawyer. Their love is real. This gallery is where they rendezvous, but now, Irene feels, they must stop.
