George Cukor’s Camille (1936) after
        Alexandre Dumas fils, The Lady of the Camellias (1848)

We enter
—the opening title card tells—
    the half-world of Paris
With no real access to the demimonde,
we find ourselves among
    pretty creatures who lived on the quicksands of popularity.
Even Dumas’s naïve narrator knows he has entered
    l’appartement d’une femme entretenue
    the apartment of a kept woman
each object signals
    a different prostitution of the poor girl.
But thirties cinema
saves us from coughed-up blood,
water
    marbled with streaks of blood.
None, not even in dark-gray-to-black
of black and white, of the splattered blood
on Renée Fleming’s pillow, enough blood
to be seen from balconies and
orchestra back rows,
for her Violetta, the Verdi
incarnation of Marguerite Gautier,
incarnadine, and quivering
in pain.

How did Cukor do it?
Greta Garbo’s face lit
celestial, Joan of Arc angelic,
her lover shadowed, at most
back lit, with his face so close
to hers, but scene after scene
the lighting follows,
only her face catches light.
Will we ever see his face
when he shares the frame
with Garbo?