Going to the theatre to watch “Anna Karenina,” I was skeptical about it. I carried with me a bad impression from another collaboration by director Joe Wright and actress Keira Knightley, “Pride and Prejudice” from 2005.
However, the British team turned out to be much more delicate with the Russian classic novel by Leo Tolstoy than it was with Jane Austen’s piece.
Published in Russia in 1878, “Anna Karenina” is mostly known as a tragic story of a married noblewoman who leaves her husband for a lover, and later, devastated by jealousy, throws herself under the train. Beyond that, the novel is a huge study of the Russian mentality and culture, although Wright’s screening focuses on Anna’s story only, leaving other storylines behind.
Wright’s movie makes the story as unnatural as possible, and does that on purpose. All the action takes place in what looks like an old classic theatre, small and lavishly decorated. Its stage, backstage and parterre all become filming locations. This is an unexpected, but brilliant multitask metaphor. In the beginning of the novel, Karenina is shown on the stage or in the parterre of the theatre, but at the end, when she comes close to suicide, she goes to the scaffold above the stage, looking down at people.
Anna is played by Keira Knightley, 27, whose unusual face was proved multiple times to fit in costume dramas perfectly. And what is more important, Knightley now controls her expressions and they are not too emotional, as they used to be in “Pride and Prejudice,” where the actress played Elizabeth Bennet.
Knightley is at least the 28th actress to play Karenina in a screen version of a novel, while huge line of her predecessors includes Vivienne Leigh and Greta Garbo. Knightley’s Anna is tender, passionate and desperate, very close to Tolstoy’s original character.
Actually, the whole movie is surprisingly close to the text of the novel. Changes by British playwright Tom Stoppard, simplify and shorten the story, but don’t really change it much.
The biggest change is probably the reduction of Konstantin Levin’s role in the movie. While Tolstoy made Levin, a young esquire, as important as Anna herself, presumably using him as a mouthpiece for his own views and discourses, in Wright’s movie he and his sweet love story only serves as a contrasting background for Karenina’s passionate affair.
And passionate it was. The movie’s special treat is original soundtrack written by Dario Marianelli, an Academy Award-winning composer. His intense and sensual music adds even more theatricality to the affair of Karenina and Count Vronsky.
No sign of miscasting can be found in the movie. Domhnall Gleeson is natural in the role of young and confused Levin, and his past as Bill Weasley in Harry Potter series doesn’t strike the eye.
The actor choice for the Vronsky part was quite risky. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, 22, is mostly known for his main role in the “Kick-Ass” comedy. He did well with a hard task of persuading everyone that Anna could be attracted to him while being married to Jude Law – that’s who plays Alexey Karenin. Also it might be hard for fans to see Law as an unattractive and boring middle-aged man, he did well making viewers think that’s what he is as Karenin.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].
