Daily Archives: Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Julien Duvivier (1948)

The running time in the BFI programme was ‘to be confirmed’; the film they showed ran 111 minutes.  It seems the print available was only recently unearthed and is half an hour short of the full movie:  Wikipedia and IMDB agree that the original lasted 139 minutes.  Perhaps as a result, a few things barely make sense.   Michael Gough (in his cinema debut) is very striking as Konstantin Levin’s elder brother Nikolai but, as he’s on screen for around ten seconds and a couple of lines, it’s not clear who he is:  he might as well just be one of the other workers on his brother’s land.  The latter’s political idealism hardly registers at all.  Even though a few days’ separation from her son Sergei is the reason for the heroine’s sad expression when we first see her face through the window of the train travelling from St Petersburg to Moscow, there’s not enough of Anna and Sergei to allow a viewer to understand how terrible it is for her to lose the boy to her husband when their marriage perishes.   These important omissions make the length of time devoted to Anna’s sojourn in Venice with Vronsky all the more surprising, though the Venetian scenes are well enough done.  But Julien Duvivier’s adaptation of Tolstoy – with a screenplay credited to himself, Jean Anouilh and Guy Morgan – is strong in conveying Anna’s inescapable passion for Vronsky and the inexorable closing off of the possibilities open to her.  The picture’s odd rhythm in its second half may partly be the result of clumsy excisions but it actually helps to get across a sense of Anna’s life going round in ever-decreasing circles.

The shocking deaths of the novel are all interestingly translated to the screen.  The accident in which a railway worker falls under a train on Anna’s arrival in Moscow happens matter-of-factly – but in a way that you can’t get out of your head.  It really does seem to be the bad omen that Anna feels it be, and to presage her own end:  that too is impressive, although of course more fully dramatised.  In the cavalry officers’ steeplechase, in which Vronsky’s mare Frou-Frou is fatally injured, Duvivier concentrates on the spectators rather than the participants and this works well – Karenin’s determination to have the last word, in spite of his wife’s socially embarrassing preoccupation with Vronsky’s state of health after his horse has come down, has particular impact.   Anna’s own humiliation at the opera in St Petersburg is also effectively done because the rejection by her social peers doesn’t take the form of serial cold shoulders but is focused on the couple in the neighbouring box – the husband talks to Anna at first and is then warned off by his wife.  A seance at which Countess Betsy Tversky presides is very well staged:  Duvivier juxtaposes the conversation among those at the table (and with the spirits) with what’s going on in the background between Anna and Vronsky – under what they assume to be cover of darkness but which the arriving Karenin can make out, as his eyes adjust to the lack of light in the room.

At first, it’s almost odd to hear Vivien Leigh with an English accent – it’s certainly a reminder that you think of her as Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche Dubois.  Leigh’s playing of Anna may seem a little unvarying (particularly in the light of seeing her Scarlett, as I did, less than twenty-four hours later) but her characterisation has depth and she’s very convincing as someone who, from an early stage in the relationship with Vronsky, simply has no choice.  Ralph Richardson makes a brilliant entrance as Karenin, meeting Anna on her return from Moscow.  As Karenin first registers the threat of Vronsky, there’s a sudden look of true devastation in Richardson’s eyes – which is quickly absorbed as Karenin resolves to ignore it.   Well aware that he bores his wife, Richardson’s Karenin is always determined to use his rectitude to justify himself and to keep the hurt Anna is causing him at bay.  Kieron Moore’s Vronsky is relatively very weak and his accent bizarre – was he trying to disguise his Irishness?   The effect is of someone trying to do an accent but not a particular accent and it makes no sense as virtually everyone else is RP English.  Still, at least there’s an initial connection between Anna and Vronsky and, because Moore cuts a good enough figure in military uniform, he looks reduced in civvies, once Anna and Vronsky are living together, which seems right.  It’s a pity that Hugh Dempster as Oblonsky and Niall MacGinnis as Levin look confusingly similar – like brothers rather than friends – because both are otherwise good; so is Martita Hunt as Countess Betsy.  Although Sally Ann Howes is samey as Kitty and a few of the other performers are a bit awkward, the posh vowel sounds that are so often a problem in English films of the period are fine here, in the high society of Moscow and St Petersburg.   Duvivier’s descriptions of social and household ritual are remarkably fresh, visually fluid and dynamic.  The score by Constant Lambert is strong too and intelligently rationed.   As a whole, the film isn’t cushioned by melodramatic conventions to assure the audience that it’s only a story – perhaps a main reason why it was a commercial failure.

22 November 2013

Joe Wright (2012)

A theatre curtain, announcing ‘Imperial Russia 1874’ then giving the film’s title, rises.  This recalls the start of Les enfants du paradis and much of what follows in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina takes place in a theatre – stage, auditorium and elsewhere.  This can’t be a comment on the way that twenty-first century audiences are likely to perceive Tolstoy’s story.   The novel isn’t about the theatre and (although there have been a small number of stage adaptations) only opera or ballet lovers are likely to associate Anna Karenina with the theatre.  Those who know it without having read the novel are more likely to have seen earlier cinema versions (excluding an American TV movie of 1985, Joe Wright’s film is the sixth in English and the eleventh in all) or television (including the underrated BBC serialisation of 1977 with Nicola Pagett as Anna, Eric Porter as Karenin and Stuart Wilson as Vronsky).  It seems that Joe Wright and, presumably, Tom Stoppard, who wrote this adaptation, mean to show that wealthy St Petersburg and Moscow society in the late nineteenth century was all about performance, about people playing the parts in which life had cast them and not departing from the script.  This doesn’t seem an original take on a period piece but there is some interest in wondering how the film-makers will carry it through.

What makes Anna Karenina 2012 such a lousy film is that they don’t.   Wright uses the theatre settings only when they suit.  When there’s an outdoor scene that won’t have much impact as a stage set and he can get prettier pictures shooting outdoors, that’s what he does.   It could be argued that, when Wright shows Levin and the peasants haymaking alfresco, he is contrasting the wholesome honesty of their lives with the artificiality and duplicity of Russian big city society but that hardly explains why Count Oblonsky’s grouse shooting also happens in the good fresh air.  When, however, there’s an outdoor episode which it seems can’t be contained within the theatrical frame, Wright goes for the impossible so that the audience can admire his daring.  The most conspicuous example is the horse race which ends with the death of Vronsky’s mare Frou-Frou.  This onstage routine is like a grotesque extension of the stylised Royal Ascot number in My Fair Lady.  The railway sequences are a baffling mixture of the real thing, a stage set and a model train chugging through painted countryside.   Joe Wright’s credo as a filmmaker appears to be:  if it’s visual it’s cinematic even if it’s nonsensical.  The only kind of plausibility most of this Anna Karenina has is that of a filmed record of a tricksy stage adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel.

Wright’s treatment of the story is not only incoherent:  he doesn’t seem to realise the consequences of his approach.  The theatrical framing is an alienation device – it confers an irreality on the proceedings, which means that Jude Law’s supple and intelligent playing of Karenin, which is naturalistically convincing, is fighting a losing though valiant battle.  It’s typical of the film that Karenin’s cracking of his fingers, a repeated habit which works so powerfully on Anna’s nerves in the novel, occurs only once – with a close-up on his hands behind his back.   This occurs at a critical point of the breakdown of their marriage:  when Karenin asks Anna what she wants, she screams back that she just wants him to stop cracking his fingers even though he’s only just started doing so.  Tolstoy’s scene of Anna’s social humiliation at the opera is retained but although the staging is exaggerated and melodramatic its impact here is seriously undermined by the incomparably more florid horse racing sequence before the same audience in the same setting.

The most damaging effect of the fancy artifice is its cruel exposure of the limitations of Keira Knightley as Anna and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (as he now calls himself) as Vronsky.  If you’re going to suggest that life in St Petersburg and Moscow is a form of puppet theatre, but one in which real people suffer extremes of joy and misery, it’s surely crucial that your actors transcend the artificiality of their setting and their own outward appearances.  Knightley and Taylor-Johnson are passionless lovers.  Joe Wright has them snog and strip every so often but this doesn’t help – the director’s pictorialising tendencies turn their artfully entwined naked flesh into art history rather than drama.  Aaron Taylor-Johnson, styled to look like the Nutcracker Prince, is less expressive than the wooden version – his performance is an embarrassment.   Knightley is nowhere near as bad; as usual, she wears her clothes beautifully, she tries hard and she’s effective in moments when she fuses Anna’s frustration and immaturity.  But her emotional range is limited and her determined intensity is mostly hollow.  I’m not being facetious when I say that, noticing her on a television advert as I wrote this note, I found her more fascinating to watch for a few seconds selling Chanel than interpreting Anna Karenina for two hours.  Keira Knightley is being tipped for an Oscar nomination for this movie.  This is a pretty good joke but one hopes it won’t be an award-winning one.

The vocal colour and histrionic energy that Matthew Macfadyen brings to the role of Oblonsky is a surprise and very welcome in this pallid company (even though Jude Law is right to colour Karenin in various shades of grey, some of them sympathetic).  Domhnall Gleeson as Levin and Alicia Vikander as Kitty have more going on between them than the leads do; although that’s damning with faint praise, Gleeson and Vikander at least bring warmth with the potential of heat to their love and marriage.  Levin is a difficult character to bring to life on film – the philosophical questioning and self-questioning that’s absorbing on the pages of the novel risks making him a bore if he keeps spouting it on screen.  It’s not surprising that Stoppard has cut ninety-nine percent of it.  Gleeson’s portrait isn’t persuasive.  His underplaying is often inexpressive and he looks like a peasant to start with, which dilutes the radicalism of the life Levin chooses – yet this is an actor you want to see again.   Emily Watson has some force as the morally censorious Countess Lydia.  The cast also includes Ruth Wilson as Princess Betsy, Kelly Macdonald as Dolly, and Olivia Williams as Countess Vronskaya.  The beloved Serioja is played by a boy called Oskar McNamara and his relationship with his mother is as weightless as the one between her and Vronsky.   The conventional high-passion lushness of Dario Marianelli’s score is at odds with most of what appears on screen but it serves its purpose:  this is a film that badly needs musical reminders of what you should be feeling.

13 September 2012