ONEGIN
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Samuel Goldwyn Films Director: Martha Fiennes Writer: Peter Ettedgui, Michael Ignatieff Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Liv Tyler, Toby Stephens, Lena Headey, Martin Donovan, Alun Armstrong, Harriet Walter, Irene Worth, Jason Watkins, Francesca Annis
With "Onegin" we're faced with one of the great paradoxes of movie-making. How do you depict the utter boredom that characters in the story are feeling without making the movie itself a bore? This is not easy but for my rubles, Martha Fiennes, sister of both this film's star, Ralph Fiennes, and the composer of its musical score, Magnus Fiennes, has portrayed ennui without boring the audience. The picture is slow-moving, Masterpiece-Theatre style, so that the MTV generation would find it excruciating if any of its representatives mistakenly wandered into the wrong screen on the way to "Galaxy Quest." Those who might appreciate a solid personal story told with integrity by a director with a sufficient budget to dazzle us with a few scenes that might have come out of "Dr. Zhivago" could do worse than take in "Onegin."
That's not to say that the film--from the verse poem that Tchaikovsky made into an opera and into a ballet as well with a wholly different score--can compare with the pages generated by Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin's verse novel written in 1823, actually the first great Russian poem ever, is difficult enough to translate into English. All attempts to do so have failed to convince literate people in the English- speaking world of the poem's majesty. The beauty of the film medium is that the glory of the verse can be approximated if the director captures the right images for the audience--which Martha Fiennes succeeds in doing by filming partly on location in St. Petersburg.
In this creditable movie version, the title character, whose role is played by Ralph Fiennes in his signature effete manner, is a man who has everything. He has good looks, charm, money, and property--two homes, in fact, one in St. Petersburg and a lavish country place that he has just inherited from his uncle. He adds up to nothing, unfortunately, because he is an idler who presumably goes through women with the same boredom with which he surveys the snowy Russian landscape. We see him at first attending an allegedly sophisticated urban recital in St. Petersburg, where he and his unproductive acquaintances sit at tables gossiping about which women can be "had" and which are not worth the effort. After taking possession of his new country home, he meets and befriends his neighbor Vladimir Lensky (Toby Stephens), is enchanted by Lensky's fiance Olga Larina (Lena Headey), but is unresponsive to the attentions of a pretty, intelligent, eligible, and straightforward young woman, Tatyana (Liv Tyler). Years later, after a series of incidents, one ending in tragedy, the romantic circumstances are ironically reversed as Evgeny Onegin realizes the terrible mistake he had made in rejecting the woman who so vulnerably confessed her love.
Surprisingly enough, Liv Tyler, considered perhaps an all- American actress appropriately cast in blockbusters like "Armageddon," profits from her earlier experience in the role of a teen girl intent on losing her virginity during a trip to Italy in Bertolucci's "Stealing Beauty." She easily inhabits the role of a reticent but up-front Russian blue blood who appears to care little for the genteel trappings of aristocracy or for the undemocratic convention of serfdom. A passionate woman seemingly fond of romantic novels that she borrows from the Onegin estate's vast library, she risks her pride by declaring her love to the handsome ex-urbanite and, having failed to capture his fancy resigns herself to marriage with a proper noble for whom she feels little emotional connection.
Of the side roles, that of the wonderful veteran of stage and screen, Irene Worth as Princess Alina evokes the movie's principal laugh, as she sharply advises Tatyana to make a politically advisable match and to forget her childish notions of marrying for love. "If you insist on your penchant for love," she responds, "Save it for outside the marriage bed."
One of my favorite spoofs of 19th century Russian novels is Woody Allen's "Love and Death"--about a devout coward in the Napoleonic wars, featuring Sergei Prokofiev's music. When we hear the term "Russian literature," we all think of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and the like--the sort with the long, epic plots with multitudes of characters we can scarcely keep track of. "Onegin," by contrast, is a chamber work, focusing strongly on two central personalities and the internal struggles they tussle with to carve out some happiness in their lives without losing their integrity. Chamber works are to big spectacles as string quartets are to rousing symphonies. They appeal to a specialized audience, as should this fine film as it negotiates the art circuit in urban centers and college communities.
Not Rated. Running Time: 106 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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