Onegin

Synopsis: It is the twilight epoch of Tsarist Russia. Jaded St Peterburg socialite, Yevgeny Onegin (Ralph Fiennes), goes to the country to attend his dying uncle. The uncle dies and leaves Onegin the entire estate. His neighbours include the sisters Olga (Lena Headey) and Tatiana (Liv Tyler). Tatiana falls in love with Onegin who not only rejects her offer, but manages to kill Olga's fiancee in a duel. They part, to meet in St Peterburg six years later. Tatiana, now married, becomes the object of the contrite Onegin's attention.

The first feature by Martha Fiennes, (sister to Ralph, their brother, Magnus composing the highly effective score), Onegin is a marvellous achievement on many levels but above all for its superb visuals, due in part to the splendid photography, part to the wonderful costume and set design and part to the locations used (the St Peterburg exteriors are logistically remarkable). Fiennes was more favoured in this respect than was David Lean who had to shoot his pre- perestroika love story, Doctor Zhivago in Spain). Fiennes' mise-en-scène is often telling (memorably the final confrontation between Tatiana and Onegin) and she and her team of designers have created a richly elegant canvas that for all its pictorialism is wonderfully wedded to the narrative and never overwhelms it.

Onegin  is film of great beauty and deserves to be seen for that, however beauty is also its weakness.
For, leaving aside the inevitable reduction or transformations of the original text by the screenwriters, within the context of the film, however tomboyishly cute she is, Liv Tyler's Tatiana lacks the intensity or mysterious "otherness" necessary to transform Fiennes' Onegin, despite a fine performance by the actor, from a world-weary cosmopolite into a gibbering lovelorn wreck, which is the essential narrative thread of the film and Pushkin's original novel-in-verse. Nor, for that matter, is there any apparent reason established why Tatiana falls head over heels for Onegin. Rather than being driven by the internal dynamics, the principal characters here are like puppets manipulated by their masters. Given that the audience recognise that the film is a romance, the task of the protagonists is simply to play out the narrative as prescribed by its stylistic conventions. The motive for watching the film is simply to enjoy the realisation itself.

One feels unkind to lay the blame for this with Tyler, for Fiennes gives her infinitely more scope here than did Bertolucci in Stealing Beauty and she responds well, particularly in the latter part of the film where she plays the gallantly faithful Petersburg wife. She can hardly be blamed for not being a Meryl Streep or Glenn Close or for the shortcomings of the script. Rather one must wonder at the decision to cast someone principally for her undeniable good looks but, moreover, someone whose looks are more appropriate to pigtails, roller-skates and hot-pants and hence, Nabokov's Humbert Humbert than Pushkin's Onegin and the stifling pretences of 19th century Russian high society.

Notwithstanding Onegin is a unfailingly tasteful visual treat, particularly for lovers of Russian literature and devotees of historical romances.

 

 

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