|
|
Try to imagine two versions of a classic English novel filmed in Ukraine twice but never once in England and then maybe my criticism of this film adaptation be a little less unkind.
Firstly the actors: other users praise the acting abilities of Hans Matheson and Keira Knightley. OK, they both look good and Matheson looks totally right as Zhivago but in all honesty they are really not that exceptional. Looking decorative seems to have taken the place of the burning passion that an adaptation of this book needs. David Lean's film was equally guilty in this area.
What we really need is a full blooded Russian version of this novel. But with the current state of the Russian film industry and the decline of Russian culture in general, that is an unlikely prospect. Maybe this is finally an unfilmable book (lots of excellent books are).
Zhivago is a poet and in the book we read his poetry, so why isn't there any of his poetry in either film version? I'm sure a Russian director such as Tarkovsky could have achieved this and used the poetry to both literary and filmic effect. Sadly he's dead, and maybe he didn't want to do it anyway.
And what of Kris Marshall as Pasha? In the first episode he is an excellent actor and a very sexy one, but in Episode 2 we get a sequence where he appears as Strelnikov which to my eye seemed almost a direct copy of Lean's, the menacing train and then a cut from his hands to the deadly communist face of poor old Pasha. Not only does he visually change, but his acting plummets as well. I admit that years have passed and he has been through a war, but in film terms this just shows him as the same old evil communist stereotype we saw in David Lean's film.
The scenery is very pretty, but there again I'm not sure why we couldn't have gone to Russia itself. The Czech Republic though cheaper is not Russia.
score /10
Rod Evan 28 December 2002
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0881233/ |
|
11-4-2021 11:29:05