Ninotchka

Saw Ninotchka, an Ernst Lubitsch film about a woman from the USSR who comes to Paris to sell some jewelry which was liberated from pre-revolution Russian royalty. The woman, who is of course cold and calculatingly utilitarian, runs into one of these disgraced royals, a duke, in a soft-focus part of town. He sets to work seducing her in a kind of pushy 1930s sort of way while she rebuffs him as any woman would rebuff some dude who began following her around town. Eventually though, because it's that kind of film, she falls for his charms. But behold! The duke is in some kind of semi-romantic relationship already with the ex-owner of the Russian jewels, a duchess who is old and twittery and aristocratic.

the film is essentially a romantic comedy, focusing much more on the cute romance and involving a trio of funny-accent-ed Russian guys who are practically the Marx Brothers, but there's a lot of interesting politics going on, just out of sight. The Russian woman lets her hair down but declares that so much fun must be payed for, that she should be lined up against a wall and shot. She is correct, of course, that her fun comes at the labor of many background waiters and barmen, but she is wrong that this is necessarily morally reprehensible. The count meanwhile, is always perfect. He speaks mostly about his own love for the Russian lady. He comes off squeaky because he just pursues what he wants which is also, this being a romance, what the Russian woman wants too. How lucky.

The antagonists are the Russian government, as personified by Bela Lugosi, and the jealous duchess. And these are the true bad guys I think anyway. The Russian government was at the time starving its people (the ongoing famines come up again and again in this film) but of course the excesses of the Russian royalty that the communists replaced were terrible as well. At one point (the film's most serious one,) the Russian woman and the duchess snipe at each other, their fight really over the duke, but their words dealing with very recent history. This fight, between the rich and the poor, the pragmatic and the romantic continues to this day and will probably forever.

An interesting movie which keeps its brains mostly off screen, the better to put its heart on display.