This film was intensely frustrating because it was so nearly so very, very good... and then it has a massive black hole in the middle of it where a major character ought to be, in the shape of Liv Tyler. She looks exactly the same as she does in "The Lord of the Rings" and is just as wooden and out of place as Tatiana as she is as Arwen; it stands out all the more because the other female characters are all so well cast, or at least so well costumed. Her Tatiana is a smooth-faced blank who doesn't fit into the early 19th century at all, whereas everyone else around her simply belongs. She looks as if she is floating around in some kind of arty TV commercial. I don't know what my mental image of Pushkin's Tatiana was, but Liz Tyler's performance is emphatically not it -- neither as the shy provincial sister nor as the matured and self-possessed queen of St Petersburg society.
She has zero 'chemistry' with Ranulph Fiennes' perfectly-cast Onegin, either; they have one scene together in his uncle's library and a bizarre scene on the lake where I think she is supposed to be ogling his supine body from a distance while he is lying around on the pier, and that is pretty much the sum total of their interactions before she suddenly declares her passionate love (in a 'letter scene' that is shot in such a confusing way, with the letter being delivered and then read before she has finished writing it, that if I hadn't already known the story I think I might have been very puzzled as to what was actually supposed to have happened). There is nothing at all surprising in the fact that Onegin turns her down, although little of what we have seen of him so far leads us to expect him to do it so gently; what is incomprehensible is why he is suddenly declaring a mad passion for her after he meets her again at his cousin's ball six years later -- particularly given that recognising her face must surely bring back memories of those same painful events that he fled Russia to forget.
Because Fiennes himself is purely brilliant in his scenes with just about everyone else, from the Petersburg roués at the start of the film to his loyal valet and his uncle's rustics, to Tatiana and Olga's mother, and most vitally with Toby Stephens' enthusiastic, Schubert-loving Lensky. The relationship between the cynical, weary older man and the impetuous young poet who tugs him despite himself into the society of his neighbours and the unexpected enjoyment of country life is beautifully depicted, and it is very clear that, whatever their petty quarrels, he does not in the least wish to be forced to fight Lensky in a duel, let alone to kill him. (Although the Hollywood "Gaaah! Noooo!" when he discovers that Lensky is in fact dead -- and if you shoot a man in the head, what else can you realistically expect? -- felt to me out of place; Fiennes' acting had already made it crystal clear that the character was devastated.)
What is not made entirely clear in this version is why Lensky, who clearly isn't keen on the duel either, insists on continuing. I think it is not so much the fact that Onegin dances with Olga as that his friend as good as calls her a vulgar little flirt after previously complaining that Lensky himself is provincial; Onegin, whose metropolitan scorn he has always rather feared, has now 'shown his true colours' by insulting Lensky's entire world. But I suspect it is probably also because his second, far from carrying out his duty of reconciling the two parties, has told him that it would be the act of a coward to fail to fight, having previously told Onegin that he will be ostracised if he doesn't accept Lensky's impulsive challenge; unfortunately I didn't gather who this character was and why he was so keen on other people getting killed!
The tragedy of this story needs to be just as much Onegin ending up killing his friend as Onegin not getting Tatiana (whom he doesn't even want until years later), and the film very much succeeds in that. Where it also succeeds, oddly enough, is in Liv Tyler's voicing of Tatiana's letter, which in this version we don't actually get to hear until Onegin pulls it out to reread after meeting her again; that actually sounded like the character in a way that none of the scenes where we get to *see* the actress ever did, although it probably helps that the lines were pretty much pure Pushkin. So it's possible that it was just her appearance and facial expressions that I found so unconvincing...
Thanks to Fiennes rather than to Tyler the film does more or less contrive to pull off the final confrontation between the two; I still couldn't understand what the character saw in her, but I did end up by crediting that somehow he did. Tyler doesn't display a range much beyond 'stiff' and 'crying' (which is at least more emotion than we have seen from her in most of the rest of the film; her Tatiana doesn't come across as mysterious or dreamy, if that was the intention, but merely as wooden), and I still felt no chemistry between them --saying that she loved him came across, frankly, as the moment's lie for which he had begged her-- but Fiennes manages to put emotion into the scene almost single-handedly. The trouble is that he is so very good at conveying meaning from the tiniest little shifts of expression that it makes her lack of it all the more apparent.
There is an odd sex scene that was presumably supposed to be significant, but that again I simply didn't understand; I couldn't even tell if (as I originally assumed) this was Tatiana responding to Onegin's overtures by making advances to her husband so as to recommit herself to the marriage -- although if so she appears to break off and go to look out of the icy window -- or whether, given the following scene, it represented Onegin's overnight fantasies about her. Unfortunately I genuinely could not be certain, at least on a TV screen and from a couple of glimpses in profile, which of the cousins she was supposed to be in bed with. I still *think* it was probably her husband!
And the final shot didn't work for me. It felt as though the director was having a bit of difficulty in ending; it might have been better to finish on Onegin on his knees in the empty room (which I suspect is more or less the way that Pushkin left it), or at least with him getting drunk on the balcony and endlessly waiting for a letter that didn't come. Having him start walking down the street felt as if the scene was then planning to get up and go somewhere, which it doesn't. It just stops.
On the other hand, although it has been a great many years since I last read Pushkin's poem, the film as a whole -- with the exception of Liv Tyler -- felt exactly and vividly right in its tone in a way that literary adaptations so very rarely do, and despite the utter change of medium from a narrative in verse with a strong authorial/editorial voice to a form where the story-telling must be third-person and conveyed by visuals without overt comment. It made me instantly want to reread the original, and not in a bad way, even though that would be an enormous struggle for me now; at any rate it instantly evoked the original in my mind. Ranulph Fiennes is ideal as the jaded Onegin, whose defensive armour ultimately breaks down; I had no mental preconceptions about what the character looked like, and he was just instantly it.
Toby Stephens is excellent as the naive, impulsive Lensky, who may be unsophisticated but is likeable for it; Lena Headey and Harriet Walter shine in their relatively brief screen time as heedless, bouncy Olga and the girls' concerned mother respectively. Pretty much all the bit-part players were seamless in their roles. The costumes (again with the exception of Liv Tyler's! Was it just the way she wore them?) were gorgeous, and reminded me once again of my preference for long-skirted coats ;-)
The big problem is that, as one IMDB reviewer puts it, "I wanted to love the movie so badly but Liv Tyler's performance kept that from happening". There must have been *some* pretty actress they could have cast who wouldn't have played the entire film in blank emulation of Emmy Rossum in "Phantom of the Opera"... and of course it doesn't help that I don't find that type of face appealing in the first place, but Tatiana didn't have to be beautiful. She just needed to be a sympathetic character with some kind of perceptible inner life.
She has zero 'chemistry' with Ranulph Fiennes' perfectly-cast Onegin, either; they have one scene together in his uncle's library and a bizarre scene on the lake where I think she is supposed to be ogling his supine body from a distance while he is lying around on the pier, and that is pretty much the sum total of their interactions before she suddenly declares her passionate love (in a 'letter scene' that is shot in such a confusing way, with the letter being delivered and then read before she has finished writing it, that if I hadn't already known the story I think I might have been very puzzled as to what was actually supposed to have happened). There is nothing at all surprising in the fact that Onegin turns her down, although little of what we have seen of him so far leads us to expect him to do it so gently; what is incomprehensible is why he is suddenly declaring a mad passion for her after he meets her again at his cousin's ball six years later -- particularly given that recognising her face must surely bring back memories of those same painful events that he fled Russia to forget.
Because Fiennes himself is purely brilliant in his scenes with just about everyone else, from the Petersburg roués at the start of the film to his loyal valet and his uncle's rustics, to Tatiana and Olga's mother, and most vitally with Toby Stephens' enthusiastic, Schubert-loving Lensky. The relationship between the cynical, weary older man and the impetuous young poet who tugs him despite himself into the society of his neighbours and the unexpected enjoyment of country life is beautifully depicted, and it is very clear that, whatever their petty quarrels, he does not in the least wish to be forced to fight Lensky in a duel, let alone to kill him. (Although the Hollywood "Gaaah! Noooo!" when he discovers that Lensky is in fact dead -- and if you shoot a man in the head, what else can you realistically expect? -- felt to me out of place; Fiennes' acting had already made it crystal clear that the character was devastated.)
What is not made entirely clear in this version is why Lensky, who clearly isn't keen on the duel either, insists on continuing. I think it is not so much the fact that Onegin dances with Olga as that his friend as good as calls her a vulgar little flirt after previously complaining that Lensky himself is provincial; Onegin, whose metropolitan scorn he has always rather feared, has now 'shown his true colours' by insulting Lensky's entire world. But I suspect it is probably also because his second, far from carrying out his duty of reconciling the two parties, has told him that it would be the act of a coward to fail to fight, having previously told Onegin that he will be ostracised if he doesn't accept Lensky's impulsive challenge; unfortunately I didn't gather who this character was and why he was so keen on other people getting killed!
The tragedy of this story needs to be just as much Onegin ending up killing his friend as Onegin not getting Tatiana (whom he doesn't even want until years later), and the film very much succeeds in that. Where it also succeeds, oddly enough, is in Liv Tyler's voicing of Tatiana's letter, which in this version we don't actually get to hear until Onegin pulls it out to reread after meeting her again; that actually sounded like the character in a way that none of the scenes where we get to *see* the actress ever did, although it probably helps that the lines were pretty much pure Pushkin. So it's possible that it was just her appearance and facial expressions that I found so unconvincing...
Thanks to Fiennes rather than to Tyler the film does more or less contrive to pull off the final confrontation between the two; I still couldn't understand what the character saw in her, but I did end up by crediting that somehow he did. Tyler doesn't display a range much beyond 'stiff' and 'crying' (which is at least more emotion than we have seen from her in most of the rest of the film; her Tatiana doesn't come across as mysterious or dreamy, if that was the intention, but merely as wooden), and I still felt no chemistry between them --saying that she loved him came across, frankly, as the moment's lie for which he had begged her-- but Fiennes manages to put emotion into the scene almost single-handedly. The trouble is that he is so very good at conveying meaning from the tiniest little shifts of expression that it makes her lack of it all the more apparent.
There is an odd sex scene that was presumably supposed to be significant, but that again I simply didn't understand; I couldn't even tell if (as I originally assumed) this was Tatiana responding to Onegin's overtures by making advances to her husband so as to recommit herself to the marriage -- although if so she appears to break off and go to look out of the icy window -- or whether, given the following scene, it represented Onegin's overnight fantasies about her. Unfortunately I genuinely could not be certain, at least on a TV screen and from a couple of glimpses in profile, which of the cousins she was supposed to be in bed with. I still *think* it was probably her husband!
And the final shot didn't work for me. It felt as though the director was having a bit of difficulty in ending; it might have been better to finish on Onegin on his knees in the empty room (which I suspect is more or less the way that Pushkin left it), or at least with him getting drunk on the balcony and endlessly waiting for a letter that didn't come. Having him start walking down the street felt as if the scene was then planning to get up and go somewhere, which it doesn't. It just stops.
On the other hand, although it has been a great many years since I last read Pushkin's poem, the film as a whole -- with the exception of Liv Tyler -- felt exactly and vividly right in its tone in a way that literary adaptations so very rarely do, and despite the utter change of medium from a narrative in verse with a strong authorial/editorial voice to a form where the story-telling must be third-person and conveyed by visuals without overt comment. It made me instantly want to reread the original, and not in a bad way, even though that would be an enormous struggle for me now; at any rate it instantly evoked the original in my mind. Ranulph Fiennes is ideal as the jaded Onegin, whose defensive armour ultimately breaks down; I had no mental preconceptions about what the character looked like, and he was just instantly it.
Toby Stephens is excellent as the naive, impulsive Lensky, who may be unsophisticated but is likeable for it; Lena Headey and Harriet Walter shine in their relatively brief screen time as heedless, bouncy Olga and the girls' concerned mother respectively. Pretty much all the bit-part players were seamless in their roles. The costumes (again with the exception of Liv Tyler's! Was it just the way she wore them?) were gorgeous, and reminded me once again of my preference for long-skirted coats ;-)
The big problem is that, as one IMDB reviewer puts it, "I wanted to love the movie so badly but Liv Tyler's performance kept that from happening". There must have been *some* pretty actress they could have cast who wouldn't have played the entire film in blank emulation of Emmy Rossum in "Phantom of the Opera"... and of course it doesn't help that I don't find that type of face appealing in the first place, but Tatiana didn't have to be beautiful. She just needed to be a sympathetic character with some kind of perceptible inner life.
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