Onegin
UK/USA 1998
Reviewed by Julian Graffy
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
The early nineteenth century. Bored St Petersburg dandy Evgeny Onegin inherits his uncle's estate and decamps to the countryside. There he meets a neighbouring landowner, the young poet Vladimir Lensky, and through him the Larin family: widowed mother and daughters Tatyana and Olga.
Naive Lensky is engaged to flighty Olga but Tatyana, who is deep, is drawn to Onegin and writes him a declaration of love. At Tatyana's name-day party Onegin rejects her and flirts with Olga, which infuriates Lensky. They quarrel and Lensky challenges him to a duel. Lensky misses and Onegin shoots his opponent dead. A horrified Tatyana comes to visit him but he has left. Tatyana's mother introduces her into society and she marries a prince. Six years later, Onegin returns from his wanderings and is captivated by Tatyana's beauty and distinction. He now writes her a passionate letter. Though she still loves him she remains true to her husband.
Review
Onegin opens with a sequence of startling beauty of a horse-drawn carriage crossing a vast expanse of snow. It is perhaps the major distinction of first-feature director Martha Fiennes' film to have made the settings of this story - the melancholy birch groves; the country estates with their contrasting interiors (the Larins' house bright and lived in, Onegin's romantically bereft); the splendour of imperial St Petersburg; a scene of people skating on a frozen river - so consistently enthralling, a triumph of cinematography, lighting and production design. Fiennes wears her background in commercials and music videos lightly - Onegin is much more visually restrained than Mumu, the version of the Turgenev story directed last year by the Russian commercials director Yuri Grymov.
This film is also uniformly well acted, with Liv Tyler compelling as the brooding Tatyana, her still demeanour somehow suggestive of the dark passions swirling beneath the surface. Lena Headey is equally persuasive as the shallow, impetuous Olga, so physically like her sister and so emotionally different. There is a hilarious turn from Simon McBurney as the girls' oleaginous French tutor, and a memorable vignette from Irene Worth as the society grande dame Princess Alina. Executive producer Ralph Fiennes in the title role and Toby Stephens as Lensky also give thoughtful performances but both, alas, are about ten years too old for the parts they play. This renders Onegin precociously racked and seedy at the start, though it makes Fiennes persuasive in the (over-elaborated) concluding episodes. Lensky, however, is 18 in Pushkin's original and having him played by a noticeably older actor makes all his poetic petulance and hypersensitivity risible and exasperating without the saving grace of extreme youth. It also draws attention to the conventionality and predictability of the plot.
Martha Fiennes has spoken of her desire to keep as close as possible to the original story of Eugene Onegin, but as she (and every Russian schoolchild) knows, to concentrate on the plot is to risk banality, removing precisely what makes this verse-novel unique: the extraordinarily vivacious authorial commentary and the famous ironic and subversive digressions through which Pushkin paints a compendious picture of a society and an age.
This itself begs the question - who is this new Onegin for? The film got its world premiere in Moscow in June as a central part of the lavish celebration of the bicentenary of Pushkin's birth. It provoked great and respectful interest, partly because the Russian film commissioned to mark the anniversary, Aleksandr Proshkin's Russian Riot, an epic version of Pushkin's story 'The Captain's Daughter', was not completed in time, and partly because the Russians, whose cinematic history is littered with Pushkin adaptations, have never filmed Eugene Onegin (though there is a film version of Tchaikovsky's opera known as Ievgeny Onegin starring Galina Vishnevskaya, made in 1958).
So maybe the film's ideal audience is in Russia. But for Russians an Onegin without the familiar lines of poetry is not Onegin, and the various minor inaccuracies, such as a waltz danced to an orchestration of a famous Russo-Japanese War song, are inescapable and unsettling. In fact there was an earlier attempt to film Pushkin's Onegin, for the centenary of his death, in 1937 (the occasion of huge Soviet celebrations). The Formalist critic (and husband of Mayakovsky's lover) Osip Brik spent two years working on a script, even attempting to preserve the authorial voice by inventing a system of what he called "resounding surtitles" - lines of the poem in Pushkin's handwriting would appear briefly on screen while being simultaneously spoken by a narrator - but the project was eventually aborted.
Of course none of these problems would be apparent to most western viewers, who would not see rows of Russian graves on Manchurian hillsides as they listened to the (charmingly orchestrated) waltz. No, the danger with western audiences may be that they will wonder what all the Russian fuss is about, finding the story of love spurned and love lost melodramatic and predictable, and the wit only occasionally approaching the level sustained in recent film adaptations of Jane Austen.
Onegin, then, is a film for which the adaptation of the literary source presented fundamental difficulties, ones the Fiennes and their collaborators were well aware of and which had defeated their illustrious predecessors. In a sense the whole enterprise is a misguided act of literary piety. And yet its achievements are far from negligible. It is respectful and sincere; it is never less than visually splendid; and at its best it takes the romantic plot of Eugene Onegin into the realms of tragic grandeur.
Credits
- Producers
- Ileen Maisel
- Simon Bosanquet
- Screenplay
- Peter Ettedgui
- Michael Ignatieff
- from the novel in verse Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
- Director of Photography
- Remi Adefarasin
- Editor
- Jim Clark
- Production Designer
- Jim Clay
- Music
- Magnus Fiennes
- ©Onegin Productions Limited
- Production Companies
- Seven Arts International presents a Baby Productions film
- Developed with the assistance of Protagonist Film Corporation
- Executive Producer
- Ralph Fiennes
- Production Supervisor
- Lesley Stewart
- Production Co-ordinators
- Wendy Lilly
- St Petersburg:
- Bi Benton
- St Petersburg Production Services
- Globus Film
- Production Manager:
- Valery Yermolaev
- Co-ordinator:
- Elenor Yanbukhtina
- Location Managers:
- Natalya Smirnova
- Alexi Zverev
- Production Manager
- St Petersburg:
- Philip Kohler
- Supervising Location Manager
- Nick Daubeny
- Location Manager
- St Petersburg:
- Harriet Earle
- Post-production Supervisor
- Miranda Jones
- Researcher
- Johanna Brownell
- Assistant Directors
- Tommy Gormley
- Mark Layton
- Sue Wood
- Sarah Purser
- Script Supervisor
- June McDonald
- Casting Director
- Mary Selway
- Tatyana & Onegin's Letters Translated/Adapted by
- D.M. Thomas
- Camera Operators
- Jeremy Gee
- 2nd Unit Camera:
- Alan Stewart
- Steadicam Operator
- Alf Tramontin
- CGI Effects
- Cinesite, Inc
- Special Effects Supervisor
- Dominic Tuohy
- Special Effects
- Effects Associates
- Snow Effects
- Snow Business
- Art Directors
- Supervising:
- Chris Seagers
- Globus:
- Vera Zeliskaya
- Set Decorator
- Maggie Gray
- Draughtspersons
- Pippa Rawlinson
- Paul Westacott
Scenic Artist- Steve Mitchell
- Storyboard Artist
- Tony Wright
- Costume Designers
- Chloe Obolensky
- John Bright
- Wardrobe
- Supervisor:
- Janet Tebrooke
- Master:
- Joe Hobbs
- Globus:
- Irina Kaverzina
- Hair and Make-up Designer
- Peter Owen
- Make-up Artists
- Chief:
- Liz Tagg
- Globus:
- Tamara Frid
- Chief Hairdresser
- Paul Gooch
- Titles
- Frameline
- Optical Effects
- General Screen Enterprises
- Music for Nikitin Ball
- Performers:
- Parley of Instruments
- Arranger/Conductor:
- Peter Holman
- Featured Musicians
- Duduk Player:
- Jivan Gasparyan
- Piano:
- Maya Fiennes
- Guitar:
- John Themis
- Balalaika:
- Bibs Ekkel
- Loyko The Russian Gypsy Band
- Orchestra Leader
- Gavyn Wright
- Orchestration/Conductor
- Brian Gascoigne
- Music for Larin Name Day
- Arranger/Conductor:
- Jason Osborn
- Music Supervisor
- Julian Hope
- Mixer/Additional Engineer
- Pete Lewis
- Engineer
- Angel Studios:
- Steve Price
- Soundtrack
- "Mir ist so wunderbar" from the opera "Fidelio" by Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by Ingeborg Hallstein, Christa Ludwig, Gerard Unger, Gottlob Frick and The Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer; "Le Colporteur" by Sarah Gorby; "Gelder Rose in Bloom" by Isaac Dunayevsky, Julian Hope, performed by Toby Stephens, Lena Headey
- Choreography
- Eleanor Fazan
- Additional Sound Design
- Nick Franglen
- Production Sound Mixer
- Ivan Sharrock
- Re-recording Mixers
- Dean Humphreys
- Craig Irving
- Tim Cavagin
- Dialogue Mixer
- John Bateman
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Eddy Joseph
- Dialogue Editors
- Mike Wood
- Matt Grime
- ADR
- Editor:
- Nina Hartstone
- Foley
- Artists:
- Pauline Griffiths
- Paula Boram
- Foley
- Mixer:
- Ed Colyer
- Editors:
- Peter Holt
- Peter Elliott
- Russian Adviser
- Tania Alexander
- Russian Etiquette Consultant
- Natasha Franklin
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Terry Forrestal
- Armourer
- Bapty's and Company
- Cast
- Ralph Fiennes
- Evgeny Onegin
- Liv Tyler
- Tatyana Larin
- Toby Stephens
- Vladimir Lensky
- Lena Headey
- Olga Larin
- Martin Donovan
- Prince Nikitin
- Alun Armstrong
- Zaretsky
- Harriet Walter
- Madame Larina
- Irene Worth
- Princess Alina
- Jason Watkins
- Guillot
- Simon McBurney
- Triquet
Gwenllian Davies- Anisia
- Margery Withers
- Nanya
- Geoff McGivern
- Andrey Petrovitch
- Tim McMullan
- Tim Potter
- dandies
- Elizabeth Berrington
- Mlle Volkonsky
- Ian East
- executor
- Richard Bremmer
- diplomat at ball
- Chloe Elise Hanslip
- child violinist
- Marion Betzold
- ballerina
- Chris Lee Wright
- the hussar
- Tom Eastwood
- Onegin's uncle
- [uncredited]
- Francesca Annis
- Katiusha
- Certificate
- 12
- Distributor
- Entertainment Film Distributors Ltd
- 9,554 feet
- 106 minutes 9 seconds
- Dolby
- Colour by
- DeLuxe