Torrent is a 1926 feature film directed by Monta Bell, starring Ricardo Cortez and Greta Garbo.
The action opens in a small town in Spain. Leonora Moreno (Garbo) is the daughter of a humble orange farmer. Leonora has a fine singing voice and hopes to make it in the opera. The Morenos' landlord, Doña Bernarda Brull, kicks them off the land in order to make more profits. Her son, Don Rafael Brull (Cortez) is in love with Leonora and wants to follow her to Paris, but Doña Bernarda refuses to let her son marry a common peasant, and she browbeats Rafael into giving Leonora up.
Fast forward a few years. Rafael, who stayed behind in their hometown, is making a nice career for himself, winning election to the Spanish parliament. Leonora as it turns out did in fact become a star in the Paris opera, and is known far and wide under her stage name of "La Brunna". Eventually, the two lovers are brought together again.
Garbo's first American film after MGM plucked her from Sweden. It made her an instant star.
Tropes:
- Bittersweet Ending: Rafael goes home broken-hearted after being rejected by Leonora for the last time, but the smile that eventually creeps over his face as he settles down with his wife indicates that he's become happy. But Leonora is broken-hearted for real, realizing she's lost her last chance at love.
- Distant Finale: There's a long time skip before the final scene. Rafael and Leonora's last reunion reveals that he's developed a paunch, wears glasses, and has lost quite a bit of his hair. Inexplicably, Leonora looks exactly the same.
- Disturbed Doves: The ringing of the bell in the farm's tower as the Morenos are getting evicted sends doves flying out.
- Foreshadowing: It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the allusion to the river sometimes becoming a raging "torrent" when it rains will pay off later in the movie. Surprisingly however it's not the climax; the big flood comes barely halfway thorugh.
- Hand Wave: Leonora doesn't seem to age, and looks the same after a couple of decades in the opera as she did when she was a young girl in the village. When Rafael boggles at this she says that "It is in the business of a prima donna to stay young."
- Longing Look: Leonora is pretty mean when she meets Rafael for the last time in the Distant Finale, laughing at how much older he looks. But the look of naked longing on her face as he turns to leave shows how she really feels.
- Love Triangle: Rafael has his fiery opera star girlfriend Leonora, and he also has Remedios, the daughter of the local pork magnate. She isn't as exciting as Leonora but she's good looking and devoted and she's the one Rafael's mother wants him to marry.
- Old-Fashioned Rowboat Date: Rafael and Remedios go on such a date. It's subverted in that Rafael's domineering mother tags along as a third wheel, but it still ends in Rafael asking Remedios to marry him.
- Picked Flowers Are Dead: When Rafael and Leonora have their first reunion years later, she reaches into his pocket and finds that he still has the orange blossoms she gave to him as a token right before she left. She then bitterly says "But now they are dead", and throws them away.
- Really Gets Around: "La Brunna" is notorious for having many lovers, something that Rafael's family uses to again talk him out of marrying Leonora.
- Redundant Rescue: The dam bursts. A frantic Rafael goes on a very difficult and dangerous boat ride through the raging river to Leonora's house to save her, only to find her relaxing in bed in a house that's dry. Leonora laughs and reminds Rafael that the old farmhouse has stood for a hundred years.
- Stage Name: In-Universe, Leonora is only known as "La Brunna" in the opera world, so no one in her home town knows who La Brunna is.
- Time Skip: "A curtain of gray years" lay between Leonora's sad departure and some time later, when she's become "La Brunna", the prima donna of the Paris Opera House.
- Title Drop: The river that runs by the town is said to be calm and placid most of the time, but occasionally a "torrent of death" when the rains come. Sure enough, there is a later catastrophic flood which is referred to as "the torrent".
