Anna Karenina (2012)

Synopsis: Anna (Keira Knightley) is a well-respected socialite in St Petersburg in 1874. She is married to high-ranking government official Alexei Karenin (Jude Law) and they have a young son. Anna receives a letter from her brother Oblonsky (Matthew McFadyen) asking her to come to Moscow to help save his marriage to Dolly (Kelly Macdonald). Dolly’s younger sister Kitty (Alicia Vikander) is adored by Oblonsky’s best friend Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) but Kitty is besotted with dashing military officer Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). However when Anna and Vronsky meet they are instantly attracted and embark upon a passionate and ultimately tragic love affair.

According to Wikipedia about 12 film versions of the famousTolstoy novel have been made. Some are faithful to the text, others "inspired" by it. I have seen none of them, nor have I read Tolstoy’s tome. Given that, it was pretty hard for me at first to come to grips with the many characters and their confusingly similar names, and given also that period of Russian history has never piqued my interest, I am probably not the best person to be commenting upon this latest version.

Scripted by the renowned playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard and directed by Joe Wright who has a couple of successful period pieces under his belt, Atonement, and Pride & Prejudice, both of which also starred Knightley, Anna Karenina brings us high-flown romance whilst also showing us the societal mores of the time and adressing the morality, or otherwise, of Anna’s convention-flouting behaviour.

So how does it shape up as a film? It is a handsome production and, unsurprisingly, is already up for 3 Oscar nominations, all in the “looks” department - cinematography, costume production and production design. It is certainly a wonderful insight into the splendid and opulent lives of the time.

Whilst there is plenty of passion generated between Anna and Vronsky, I found Johnson a little too effete for the role, and I always find it hard to get past Knightley’s pugnacious jaw and odd lopsided grin. The standout performances are those of Law who breathes gravitas into his Karenin, and the roles of Levin, Kitty and Dolly also spoke to me on a more human level than those of the leads with almost as much emphasis given to the Kitty/Levin affair as to the Anna/Vronsky one.

But what I found difficult to accept is the unusual structuring premise upon which the production is built. There is an odd intertwining of theatre and film, such that the movie starts with the illusion that we are watching a play, and then the camera zooms in taking us into a “real” world. Throughout the runtime we alternate between this world and staged scenes that take us back to this theatrical context. Some may see this strategy as an audacious ploy, perhaps reflecting the highly-mannered conventions of Russian high society of the time but for me it is an estranging device that seems pretentious, and is ultimately alienating.

The main reason I give this a 3-star “worth seeing” guernsey is for the opportunity to get acquainted with one of literature’s classic romances in a film that surely is a wonderful piece of visual artistry.

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