To borrow the famous opening line of the novel: Every film remade from "Anna Karenina" is "unfaithful" in different ways.
Joe Wright, the latest director to make a valiant attempt, had a blunt assessment of previous films in a recent phone interview: "It's usually seen as a great romantic love story. , Anna is a martyr in it, a victim of a patriarchal society, and for me, that's not the case at all. I'm really shocked and despised at the same time." Then he said more bluntly: "People Totally twisted what Tolstoy meant by writing the book, and they did it all for profit, you know?"
For "Anna Karenina" (November 16 in North America), a bold stage adaptation, he said: "I want to tell the story that Tolstoy wanted to tell." Easier said than done, so Mr White must have chosen not to be specific about what he thought the story was. Adapting any novel as heavy as Anna Karenina depends largely on finding the right emotional tone. But Mr White and screenwriter Tom Stoppard's decision not to include Anna (Keira Knightley) and her lover, Count Alexei Vronsky Aaron Taylor-Johnson (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson), this hard-fought couple's handling of a great love is at least a step in the right direction.
The problem with this book (besides its length) for filmmakers is that its story can easily be a romantic mistake in itself. With just a few tweaks, "Anna Karenina" fits into a typical and once foolproof template for the genre—the "women's film." In those melodramas, the focus throughout is on the suffering of the heroine—tortured by the man or by the ungrateful child or by society as a whole, and ultimately, by fate, without exception. It was as if there was a great conspiracy against her happiness: if a woman dared to love too deeply, as Anna did to Vronsky, the gods would let her down.
The novel's most famous film adaptation, the 1935 version by Clarence Brown, used this scheme. The heroine is Greta Garbo, who is at the peak of her career. While Brown's director is elegant and Fredric March casts a well-placed, enthusiastic Vronsky, the film is a high-end tearjerker -- which is clearly the studio's MGM wants. The values on which the studio is known are often tawdry and frivolous. In particular, it is Garbo's clothing that dominates the crowd. The coat was too hem and embellished, and the hat was amazing; when Anna watched a horse race Vronsky entered, she looked like a Southern belle at the Kentucky Derby. (In this version, you might think that the name of Vronsky's horse, Frou-Frou, describes the rubbing noise of silk and other fabrics, which can be extended to the richly decorated style of dressing. It 's
true that Garbo turned world-weary looks into an art in the 1980s, but her performances in the movies felt oddly absent-minded: another one of her performances in The Grand Hotel "I vant to be alone" in "I vant to be alone" (Grand Hotel, 1932). And Anna, she can say whatever she wants, at least one thing she definitely doesn't want - at any time, in any accent - and that is being alone. Perhaps Garbo looked so tired because she had already played the role, in the 1927 silent film "Love," directed by Edmund Goulding, She is much more lively in it. She was only 22 at the time—too young for Anna, who had an 8-year-old son—but she had a natural gravitas that allowed her to play an older woman with ease, while Her de facto youth gives the role the passion it needs; her real-life love, John Gilbert, who played Vronsky during the audition, may have done her a favor, too.
"Love" itself is quite ridiculed, and it carries a scarlet letter of shame -- the only "Anna Karenina" movie in history with a happy ending. (The one shown in Europe is faithful to the end of the novel, but unfortunately, all the DVDs currently on the market are the delightfully American version.) Likewise, it cuts the story into pieces with near-destructive means. The triangular relationship between Lenski, Anna, and her husband, Alexei Karenin, completely excludes the main character, Konstantin Levin. Levin is a philosophical country landowner whose story — basically also about love — makes up almost half of the novel. Without Levin's story, Mr. White argues, "Anna's story seems completely unreasonable—or at best a horribly poor one." The
new Anna Karenina does not forget about Levin (more Domhnall Gleeson), or see it as an inconvenient, somewhat inexplicable little person, though this acceptance really isn't an innovation. The 1967 Russian version, directed by Aleksandr Zarkhi, was savvy, gave Levin a lot of room, and actually treated him more fairly than Vronsky (here In the Soviet adaptation, Vronsky is portrayed as a weak-willed aristocrat). Still, Levin's role is no guarantee of success. Bernard Rose's pale 1997 version -- titled Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with a bit of arrogance -- cares too much Levin, actually let this country gentleman narrate the whole movie. The decision promised to be made during the editing of the film, as the filmmakers realized that their Anna — a pouting Sophie Marceau — was dead, and that was fatal.
Mr. White and Mr. Stoppard fully understood the importance of Levin, and at the same time realized that the cuckolded Karenin needed to be portrayed in many details. Their Karenin actor, Jude Law, must have spent a lot of time researching Ralph Richardson's excellent performance of the character -- in Julien Duvivier In the director's 1948 version of "Anna Karenina." (With Vivien Leigh as the capricious Anna, and Henri Alekan's heady cinematography, that film is overall the best of many early versions, even played by Kieron Moore Not even the fool Vronsky could bring it down.) But Mr. White, in his words "after a long time", realized that this alone was not enough, so he plunged headlong into it, like the heroine. Unknown world.
"It's been a while," he said. "I felt that the tradition of realism was too rigid on the surface of things, and I found the charm of Tolstoy's novels in the distortions and transformations of the images in the characters' minds. I wanted to find A way of expression is more suitable for conveying the experience.” So, in Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007), he chose the naturalistic approach , this time he abandoned it. He turned to the stylization of the plot, bringing scenes from St. Petersburg and Moscow to a richly decorated but somewhat run-down theater stage, as if his actors were performing a play. Instead, only Levin's series of rural life is shot live. “When doing desk work on Russian theatre,” he says, “I was fascinated by Meyerhold.” —Vsevolod Meyerhold, an early 20th-century pioneer Sent drama director, executed by Stalin in 1940 - "Something he said struck me deeply: the correct way to imitate a certain style is to subtract, not add, that is to say, to take away the surface and try to get to the essence."
On the surface, Mr. White's unnaturalistic stage shot is a blatant departure from Tolstoy's novel, one of the monuments of 19th-century realist fiction. Audiences will judge for themselves whether such a style enhances or weakens the power of the story, but there is no doubt that removing some "decoration" will have the effect of accelerating the development of the plot and, to some extent, making more The scenes of novel characters can appear on the screen. (For Tolstoy, the more the merrier.) "We do this," Mr. White said, "to make the film more economical in pace." He explained: "The carriage stops in front of the palace. There is no need for such a shot, and in fact these very expensive shots usually have little to do with the performance of the character."
A film as well known as "Anna Karenina", there is no doubt about it A literary work that is so great and is constantly being adapted into film, when we are faced with yet another adaptation, inevitably becomes an exercise of appreciation. It's as natural as audiences go to ballet, opera, classical music and Shakespeare performances. While it might feel a little different in the cinema, it's as if our best judgement is to compare Daniel Craig and Sean Connery who played better James Bond . (In another long-forgotten 1961 BBC adaptation, by the way, Mr Connery played first-rate Vronsky rival Claire Bloom.) But if you love a novel, You'll want a movie based on a novel to match your memory, so you can't help but compare among all these Annas, Vronskys, Karenin, and Levins, and use what you've believed in over the years, and Watching "Anna Karenina" over and over again in imaginary theater to measure it all.
The audience’s relationship with a novel like Anna Karenina is like a long marriage. The relationship of any film adaptation to its literary source is more like a passionate impulse, a dark night voyage. When patient prose fiction meets sparkling, poetic film, each sees something in each other and decides, for whatever reason, to be together. Like Mr White's attempt to maintain his fidelity to the original in his passionate new "Anna Karenina," in a romance like this, fidelity is fragile and limited. The tragic story of Anna and Vronsky, he says, "is not a great love story, but more of a great erotic story." And, though he doesn't say it, any version of Anna Karenina's ” can be understood so. Of course, each is different.
View more about Anna Karenina reviews
