Count Vronsky

Garbo's performance is mesmerising, embodying the complexity and vulnerability of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage with her husband Karenin, played by Basil Rathbone.

The film opens with Anna travelling by train to Moscow, where she meets the dashing Count Vronsky, portrayed by Frederick March.

Vronsky's immediate infatuation with Anna sets the stage for a passionate and ultimately doomed affair.

Garbo's portrayal of Anna is both regal and deeply emotional, capturing the internal conflict of a woman torn between societal expectations and her desires.

Her chemistry with March is palpable, though some critics argue that March's portrayal of Vronsky lacks the depth and intensity needed to fully convey the character's inner turmoil.

Clarence Brown's direction is elegant, with a focus on the opulence and decadence of Russian aristocracy.

The film's cinematography by William Daniels is particularly noteworthy, capturing the grandeur of the settings and the intricate details of the period costumes.

But a girl is not asked, she's expected to make her choice, and yet she cannot choose, she can only answer yes or no.

Yes, to choose between me and Vronsky, thought Levin, and the dead thing that had come to life within him died again, and only weighed on his heart and set it aching.

Darya Alexandrovna, he said, that's how one chooses a new dress or some purchase or other, not love.

The choice has been made, and so much the better, and there can be no repeating it.

Ah, pride, pride, said Darya Alexandrovna, as though despising him for the baseness of this feeling in comparison with that other feeling which only women know.

At the time when you made Kitty an offer, she was just in a position in which she could not answer.

She was in doubt, doubt between you and Vronsky.

Him she was seeing every day, and you she had not seen for a long while.

You know, Anna Karenina is a first-class critique of what today we call the sexual revolution at a very, very early date.

I have an article that Anna Karenina and Vronsky, et cetera, this was a very early statement of the red pill.

And I'm reading this and I'm saying, my God, this could have been written, you know, a week ago.

So this has nothing to do with that.

You know, reading Tolstoy for the first time, you realize that he's very much open to interpretation and how rare it is to find such a complimentary, such a charitable explanation of your opponent as with Ivan Ilyin.

Now, of course, today it wouldn't matter because we don't agree on what's good and what's evil.

You know, we could read Anna Karenina and realize, yeah, the sexual revolution was evil, even though it only existed in the upper classes at the time in Russia, thanks to the Freemasons and groups like that, because it is irrational and it leads to the situation between Anna and Vronsky.

So many people get hurt and you don't really think that way.

One event, an event of great importance to both from that point of view, did indeed happen.

That was Kitty's meeting with Vronsky.

The old Princess Maria Borisovna, Kitty's grandmother, who had always been very fond of her, had insisted on seeing her.

Kitty, though she did not go into society at all on account of her condition, went with her father to see the venerable old lady, and there met Vronsky.

The only thing Kitty could reproach herself for at this meeting was that at the instant when she recognized in his civilian dress the features once so familiar to her, her breath failed her the blood rushed to her heart and a vivid blush she felt it overspread her face but this lasted only a few seconds before her father who purposely began talking in a loud voice to vronsky had finished she was perfectly ready to look at vronsky to speak to him if necessary exactly as she spoke to princess maria borsovna and more than that to do so in such a way that everything to the faintest intonation and smile would have been approved by her husband whose unseen presence she seemed to feel about her at that instant She said a few words to him, even smiled serenely at his joke about the elections, which he called Our Parliament.

She had to smile to show she saw the joke.

But she turned away immediately to Princess Maria Borsovna, and did not once glance at him till he got up to go.

Then she looked at him, but evidently only because it would be uncivil not to look at a man when he is saying good-bye.

And [laughs] it's like the same things that happened to Tolstoy.

He'd publish three chapters, and then he'd be on the street, and people are stopping him and saying, "You've gotta bring back Count Vronsky."

[laughs]

"She's gonna die of a broken heart," or, and, "You can't let Anna Karenina die at the end."

Then in Anna Karenina, he tackles the collision of modern desire with social law.

Yes, Anna Nera's affair with Vronsky is brilliant, but destructive in a world that completely forgives male appetite, but pathologizes and destroys female freedom.

And he contrasts her tragic arc with Levin's search for a workable faith and his relation to land and labor.

But the detail that always gets me with Tolstoy is what critics call his deceptive transparency.