this face not drawn but instead sculptured in something smooth and friable

Still, in that deified countenance, something sharper than a mask appears: a sort of deliberate and therefore human relation between the curve of the nostrils and the superciliary arcade, a rare, individual function between two zones of the face; the mask is merely an addition of lines, the face is above all a thematic recall of the former to the latter. Garbo's fate represents that fragile moment when cinema is about to extract an existential beauty from an essential beauty, when the archetype will be inflected toward the fascination of perishable figures, when the clarity of carnal essences will give way to a lyric expression of Woman.