Anna Karenina
Directed by Aleksandr Zarkhi
Written by Vasily Katanyan and Aleksandr Zarkhi from the novel by Leo Tolstoy
1967/USSR
Mosfilm
First viewing/Netflix rental
“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
My favorite novel gets an epic, but lackluster, treatment from Mosfilm.
Anna Karenina (Tatyana Samoylova, “The Cranes Are Flying”) is married to the much older Alexi Karenin, who is a dry, self-absorbed politician. They have a young son, Sergei. They live in Saint Petersberg. Anna goes on a mission of mercy to Moscow to convince her philandering brother Stiva’s wife Dolly to forgive him. On the train there, she meets the mother of the dashing officer Alexis Vronski. When Vronski and Anna meet the attraction is immediate and irrestistible. They begin an affair.
Karenin is all about his reputation and while he doesn’t seem to care all that much about the infidelity he is not about to be humiliated in public. Anna becomes pregnant and almost dies in childbirth. Karenin finally frees her to live with Vronski but refuses to give her a divorce or to let her see her son. Things go way downhill from there.
I love Tolstoy’s book so much. It is clearly impossible to convey the tone or depth of the 800-page novel in a two-hour movie. All the versions I have seen accomplish part of truncation by glossing over the romance between an intellectual named Levin and Dolly’s sister Kitty. But it is this relationship that completes the contrast foreshadowed in Tolstoy’s famous first line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
This film is very grand and epic but I thought it was, at core, lackluster. My favorite film adaptation so far is Julien Duvivier’s Anna Karenina (1948) with Vivien Leigh and Ralph Richardson.
