When I first saw this lavish Joe Wright/Tom Stoppard adaptation of the Tolstoy novel, at the cinema in 2012, I wasn’t sure what to make of it at all. The radical decision to stage many of the scenes in a theatre set means that you never know quite what to believe – is the action really taking place or is it a stylised manifestation of a character’s feelings? On second viewing, I began to see it as a masterpiece that deliberately pulls apart the “reality” it constructs – perhaps to suggest that everything we do is a sort of fiction. It has a lot of fun with this – for example, switching from footage of a real train to a toy train and seeming to delight in the fact that it’s obviously a miniature model. In another scene, a letter is torn up and thrown into the air. The pieces keep falling because they have become snowflakes. Sometimes a door or window on the stage opens to another place entirely. There’s a sort of Escher logic to it, and you wonder how on Earth they planned it all so cleverly.
The danger is that such a stylised approach might limit the film’s emotional impact, but if anything it works the other way, elevating simple scenes into works of art that magnify the characters’ situations. It would presumably have been so much easier to make the film as a standard costumer, but instead it operates on a higher level.
Keira Knightley is appealing and convincing in the title role. Jude Law looks nothing like himself as her rigidly controlling husband. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the dangerous, icily charming Count Vronsky, who Anna has a devastating affair with. The love story is expertly told. There’s a parallel tale of what happens when passion and freedom conflict with social conformity. Should you follow your heart or do what’s expected of you by your peers and your class? For Anna, of course, neither option works out well.
No comments:
Post a Comment