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I am afraid we appear to be in the minority in feeling the TV Zhivago was poor visually, which hampers anything else a film my try to do. We don't like to discuss "looks," but they are, after all, the main attraction in film. After attraction comes deeper things.
But if looks are bad, we can't get anywhere else.
Maybe some of it is the Uma Thurman clone problem. Larissima is the heart of the Pasternak story, and this girl looks like one of the concentration camp refugees from Vogue. Neill looks like she looks like that. Passion is far-fetched with a skeleton.
Lara's mother looks similarly emaciated, and we just have to accept that Neill/ Kamorovsky likes women who look nothing like the early 20th Century Russian ideal, which was zaftig; corpulent by today's standards. His contacts in Moscow's power centers must have thought this Victor quite eccentric in his tastes in women's looks.
The moral questions of chance bumping up against ideology, and love against eternity are not touched. The artistic ones involving contrasts between poetry and practicality, feelings and time can't be, with such a dingy, dark look overall. Everything looks like rainstorms have been unsuccessful clearing away the darkness following a nuclear war.
--which the Bolshevik revolution almost occasioned during 1962, and this film seems destined to repeat visually in 2003.
score 1/10
dave-1986 12 September 2005
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1170505/ |
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11-4-2021 11:29:06