Anna Karenina

Cecil says: Some of the billboards for this film refer to it as 'Joe Wright's Anna Karenina'. Hmmm, that sounded a note of warning in my mind. And once the film began, I just thought: What the...

What's with all the West End choreography? For goodness sake.

It's funny, though, isn't it? When we went to see Brief Encounter on the West End stage, and they combined film clips from the movie with the stage performance, it really worked.

But the ridiculous synchronised office staff, and frozen fixed dancers, who begin moving at a signal from somewhere off-stage. And the constant views of the stage ropes and stage floor.

What WAS he trying to do? A Brechtian distancing of the audience from the action on the screen? Maybe it was to distract away from the less-than-convincing acting on the stage...

Honestly, for one the best, most passionate pieces of literature ever, this was contrived nonsense.

Where it stuck to 'normal' cinematic bits, I got engaged with it. It's hard to ruin totally such a fantastic plot and such amazing characters. But Joe Wright did his best to (and it surely wasn't Tom Stoppard's screenplay?).

I didn't really care about any of the characters; I didn't feel much empathy for any of it.

Oh dear, the whole charade made me want to read the book again just to take away the image of Keira Knightley as Anna...

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Bea says:  I have been waiting for the right moment in my life to read this classic work of literature.  After seeing this, I think that time might be now.  I wonder if I had read it, this would have been an easier film to watch - but according to Cecil it made no difference at all.

In some ways I didn't mind the whole theatrical premise - it was very opulent and beautiful to look at certainly.  But it was - distracting.  And it did make me not enter the characters and their situation quite in the way I might have if it had been more conventionally told.  But maybe that was also the somewhat wooden acting of Keira Knightley, who has her place but it is not really this.  I just don't think she acts well enough - my emotions weren't really hooked at all as Anna moves further and further down the path of self-destruction, and I didn't care enough about her.  I wasn't too sure about Matthew MacFadyen either - both he and Knightley seemed to have been told to ham up their Britishness, which was frankly odd in Imperial Russia.

I did enjoy some of the subplots and the actors involved in those - particularly Domhnall Gleeson as Levin, who we have just recently seen in Shadow Dancer, and perhaps I am being too fanciful but there were some references to Dr Zhivago too, or was it just Imperial Russia, steam trains and steppes?

Nice to look at, but if you want to really get caught up in the story, you might be better off buying the book.

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