Fragments from the novel

The audience shushed the new "Anna Karenina" by Karen Shakhnazarov - like Anna herself in the theater. The New Times stands up for the new series and reminds about five more unusual adaptations

Not everyone gets the chance to film Anna Karenina. Here Sergei Solovyov was looking for money for his version for 15 years, and then for another four years he waited for a television premiere. It is believed that Karen Shakhnazarov deserved his Karenina - a film for hire and a series for the Rossiya 1 channel - without fail speaking in the political talk show of this channel for everything state and against the "fifth column". Shakhnazarov himself, however, claims that the state channel persuaded him to film Karenina for two years.

Incomplete convention

Tolstoy's prose seems easy to film - no verbal monograms, everything is crystal clear: we take the school of Russian psychological theater, turn on realism. Here is the curl around Anna's neck, here are Vronsky's solid teeth, here is the ball, here are the horse races.

But all this is not automatically transferred to the screen. You can take it offscreen or depict a stream of consciousness in their faces, God bless them, with Tolstoy's "slipping oysters" and "spread glasses". But what about time, which he slows down, then gallops, with the air that he blows into his heroes, forcing them to walk among us as if alive? Without him, everything shrinks to a romance about a mistress and an officer, to a sugar story of a good Levin.

Shakhnazarov proposes a witty idea: the elderly Count Vronsky, an officer of the General Staff, wounded in 1904 in the war in Manchuria, meets an adult Seryozha Karenin, a doctor, in the hospital, and at his request remembers Anna.

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Either the point here is in his memory (30 years have passed after all), or only the heroine is important to him, but Levin is not in his memoir, and Kitty flashes in the episode. The whole of St. Petersburg fits on one street, and the Karenins live in a museum: their living room with a balustrade is huge, the walls are painted with cyclopean bodies and horses.

The love story is based on close-ups of Elizaveta Boyarskaya and Maxim Matveev, and here, as with any love duet: if one of the two is not nice to you, the story is gone for you

Alas, the creators of the series were afraid to bring the convention to the end. They disguise cardboard facades as stone, sew caps on maids, glue sideburns on Karenin - by the way, in sideburns, the brutal Vitaly Kishchenko, familiar to us from the roles of prisoners and cops, looks not like a dignitary, but a hunter. Yes, and routine film music, as in the school film adaptation.

Our Marianna

This, of course, is not a film adaptation, but fragments from the novel. One storyline is the relationship between Anna, Karenin and Vronsky, many characters were reduced, the lines were distributed to the elite.

The love story is based on close-ups of Elizaveta Boyarskaya and Maxim Matveev (Vronsky), and here, as with any love duet: if one of the two is not attractive to you, the story is gone for you.

The audience is always partial to those who play Karenina - she is our symbol, almost like the French Marianne. New Karenina is erected on a pedestal less often than generations are replaced - now Tatyana Samoilova reigns there, although Alexander Zarkhi's film is 50 years old this year. Advanced viewers recognize Anna Keira Knightley - not ideal, but for a foreigner it will do. (Will Tatyana Drubich ever be recognized?)

To play Karenina to an actress - as an actor of Hamlet. Frontier. Call. At the same time, the actress is lorned and dismantled, this is normal. But the fury with which they greeted Karenina-Boyarskaya is surprising. It turns out that you can not play Anna with such a face, such a nose and such a bang.

We have long lived in a world where Hamlet was played by youths, old men, women, where Karenina was the blonde Greta Garbo, the elderly Alla Tarasova, snub-nosed Maria Germanova and Vivien Leigh, Sophie Marceau with bangs. But Boyarskaya, it turns out, does not pass face control.

Knife and wound

She is scolded even before viewing, according to the photograph. And you need to see her in motion, to hear this cello timbre, unexpected in a fragile body, harsh intonations.

True, they scold her for them too. Anna should be a portly lady from a school reader - softness, fullness, white hands. Who remembers how at Tolstoy's she hugs her brother at the station - "a movement that struck Vronsky with its determination and grace." How he marvels at the "energy grip with which she shook his hand firmly and boldly."

Boyarskaya plays this energy, the nerve. Her violent Anna destroys everything she touches, first of all - herself. Makes the lives of those who love her a nightmare. She knows no compromise, she needs only the highest intensity of passion. Her Anna is a knife and a wound. This is a great job if you see beyond the shape of the nose. How she balances on the verge of tension and breakdown, how she authentically slips into madness. Her playing style is dryness and clarity, zero fuss, not an ounce of sugar and fat, nothing womanish. And, it seems, no Karenina in the cinema had such a straight back, no one had ever worn a dress (a separate success of the film) with impudent podium grace.

A partner to match her - from the intelligent and subtle Vronsky for once does not smell like an officer's stable. Matveev, unlike Boyarskaya, does not play passion, but love, not destruction, but an attempt to build something - in this sense, he replaces Levin, he even got some replicas. The best thing in the series is their scenes together, where you can see how Vronsky supports Anna, catches how I will take in the ballet, without losing to her in anything.

A quarrel, Vronsky fooling around, trying to defuse the situation: he puts on a top hat, opens an umbrella, kisses the irritated Anna on the back of the head - it seems to me that this scene could give Tolstoy a quiet ironic pleasure.

Or Anna's outrageous dressing, all those airy petticoats, pantaloons, the rustle of satin, the creak of cambric, small hooks and Vronsky, pulling her into a corset. This is a metaphor - the lover is trying to fit the frantic Anna into the box. Or tenderness? Or a reason to think about what the everyday life and timing of adultery were like in those days: neither you throw off your dress, like a grove sheds leaves, nor have time to meet at lunchtime.

Economy mode

Meeting Vronsky with Seryozha at war is a good idea. The main problem is that the authors do not seem to know what to do with them next. This frame holds the structure, but nothing happens here. The two whom Anna - so she said - loved more than life and could not unite, found themselves face to face - and then the screenwriter was eliminated.

Who is Serezha? Why did he become a doctor, why does he speak with Count Vronsky not as an equal, although he should have inherited the same title and fortune? Whole fate - where is she?

The rustle of satin, the creak of cambric, small hooks... Such were the everyday life and timing of adultery in those days: neither you throw off your dress, like a grove sheds leaves, nor have time to meet at lunchtime

Or Vronsky - his main war ended 30 years ago, but there is still no death, he is bored, waiting, calmly, like a musketeer, playing cards under bullets. But why is he immediately confessing to Serezha? And why do these two part the same as they met, where is their relationship? And if it doesn't matter, why do they need so much screen time?

Despite the fact that the Tolstoy part is cut off to the bone. You physically feel the austerity regime on scenes, characters, replicas. Anna has to call Vronsky directly into the street for a conversation - the very one where everything is in plain sight and carriages drive past. Betsy Tverskaya (Anastasia Makeeva) cut to one and a half scenes. All of Vronsky's friends are replaced by Yashvin (Alexander Gorbatov). All of Italy, with its happiness and freedom, is one scene against the backdrop of a mountain.

Here is the main contradiction with Tolstoy: he is not stingy. His world is populated with a bunch of unnecessary people and details - this is what makes it a world.

We only get a plot about obsession from them. Anna is obsessed with passion, Vronsky is obsessed with it even after 30 years. “She is here now,” he says to Serezha. He's not sure she's dead, maybe she's gone somewhere.

We know where. But there is something in this - to shoot Anna Karenina, which does not throw itself under the train.

Photo: kinopoisk.ru