Anatole Litvak (1956)
A woman fresh out of a Paris mental asylum is groomed by a group of Russian expatriates to pass herself off as Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicolas II – the daughter, that is, persistently rumoured to have survived the massacre of the Romanov royal family at Ekaterinburg in 1918. Anastasia was seventeen when her parents and siblings were assassinated; the story the film tells takes place in 1928. The would-be Anastasia is played by Ingrid Bergman, a great actress who is not so great that she could be mistaken here for someone in her mid-twenties (Bergman was forty at the time). It’s no surprise that no one remarks on the apparent age discrepancy: this is a ludicrous picture in many ways. The screenplay by Arthur Laurents and Guy Bolton was ‘adapted’ from a stage play by Bolton and Marcelle Maurette. Those inverted commas are meant to signify what a perfunctory process the adaptation turns out to be: there’s yards of dialogue and many dead-on-the-screen scenes. With a kind of inverse Midas touch, the director Anatole Litvak manages to dissipate the tension that I assume (to give it the benefit of the doubt) the play may have had. For example, the relentless, exhausting coaching of Anna Koreff/Anastasia to move and talk and reel off facts to prove a detailed knowledge of the Romanov household may have had an intensity in the theatre; it’s puzzling why Litvak couldn’t emulate this by skilful montage. Instead, these short sequences just dribble away – they don’t build at all. The cinematographer was Jack Hildyard and the opening sequences in Paris at night – as Anna, frightened and disoriented, hurries through the streets – move with an almost scary urgency. But Litvak is so impatiently anxious to show off the sets and costumes (which are, respectively, garish and unpleasing for the most part) and work up some dynamic, Rar-shan atmosphere that the camera can’t keep still whatever it’s recording. This hyperactivity is no predictor of the stasis to come. The lighting of the interiors is utterly bland.
Bergman famously won an Academy Award and other prizes for this. Perhaps it was a weak year but it’s hard to think she deserved them (the performance isn’t in the same league as the one in Gaslight which landed her the first Oscar). She’s sometimes powerful but somehow just what you’d expect. There’s a lot of hysterical laughter in her rendering of an unstable personality: more crucially and disappointingly, she doesn’t dramatise Anna’s unstable sense of identity. Unless we’re tantalised by the possibility that she may really be Anastasia – or believes that she is – the whole enterprise seems pointless. General Bounine, the leader of the group who coach and promote Anna, is played by Yul Brynner with considerable panache – and mystery: in fact Brynner’s Bounine is more interestingly impenetrable than Bergman’s Anna. Both of them are good at suggesting the increasing, largely unspoken (for which much relief) attraction between their characters. The best acting in Anastasia comes when Anna, after getting drunk (which Bergman does very well), is in bed and offscreen and calling out to Bounine: Brynner stalks round outside her bed chamber looking possessed but uncertain. You never get a sense of any of the characters longing to believe, for anything other than financial gain, that Anastasia survived. Helen Hayes is unexciting as the Dowager Empress and Martita Hunt, although relatively entertaining as her lady-in-waiting, is very conventionally theatrical. Apart from Felix Aylmer as some kind of royal court official, the playing of the smaller parts is at best very broad (Akim Tamiroff), at worst just bad (Ivan Desny, Sacha Pitoeff). Most of the accents sound silly even though I guess some of the cast didn’t need to do much to produce them. Whereas Hayes speaks with an accent (and it’s terrible), other native English speakers like Aylmer and Hunt aren’t required to. I kept wondering how long Anastasia was going to go on then it was suddenly over, as if everyone had decided it just wasn’t worth wasting any more time.
10 August 2011
