All The World's A Stage - The Work of Ralph Fiennes

[Chelly]

[Dee]

WOW! What a heartstopper this photo is. I've never seen it before. This is one of my all time fav RF films and would love to talk more about it but can only stop for a minute - back on Tuesday but couldn't wait that long to comment on this stunning photo.

Thank you so much Chelly!
_________________
"Take my word that I'm smiling"

[Mary Frances]

http://www.filmthreat.com/index.php?section=features&Id=1637

FILM PHONICS: "POSSESSION" & "ONEGIN"

by Stina Chyn
(2005-11-29)

Possession

* *.5

2002

Onegin

* * *.5

1999

Byatt Riot to One Fiennes Day: Possession and Onegin

Week Fourteen of Film Phonics, coinciding with Thanksgiving 2005, offers a two-for-one special. Rather than picking one out of the two tied words, I decided to watch two films. For “possession,” the choice is obvious; for “gin,” I selected “Onegin” (Martha Fiennes, 1999). Both films engage historical settings and explore the consequences of loving, lying, and loitering about in egocentrism. Incidentally, they also feature actresses I watch on somewhat of a regular basis. Gwyneth Paltrow is a guilty pleasure; Liv Tyler a non-guilty pleasure.

I firmly believe that English and Australian actors (Gary Oldman, Christian Bale, Kate Beckinsale, Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett) can do American accents better than Americans (virtually everyone who's tried) can do English accents, so why don’t casting agents, directors, and or producers hire accordingly? One must A). have very little faith in a film unless it's led by a big-name American star or B). be completely delusional in thinking that audiences would forgive and willingly endure an American butchering the English accent.

Nevertheless, American still actors who take on parts requiring them to lose their American accent. Gwyneth Paltrow is one such actress. She nailed it relatively well in “Emma” (Douglas McGrath, 1996); she didn’t give me a headache in “Sliding Doors” (Peter Howitt, 1998). “Shakespeare In Love” (John Madden, 1998), her third English role, was charming enough to land her the Oscar for Best Actress. Unfortunately, in Neil LaBute's 2002 film “Possession,” not only does Gwyneth speak in one of the more unbearable English accents of all time, but she also succeeds in proving that practice does not lead to perfection. It actually leads to pain.

Based on A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession: A Romance, Paltrow plays Dr. Maud Bailey, a British academic who helps American research assistant Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) uncover the truth about the relationship between two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam) and Christabel La Motte (Jennifer Ehle). Gwyneth is mediocre at best, but Aaron Eckhart (“Erin Brockovich,” “In the Company of Men) holds his end of the film considerably well. I've not read the book, but I imagine that its character and emotional development is richer, more complete, and moving enough to elicit much sympathy from the reader.

LaBute's film doesn’t impart to me any lasting thoughts. I enjoyed the attention to detail with sets as well as the occasional humorous remarks exchanged between Maud and Roland. There are also a few cleverly constructed shots where the past transitions to the present, but LaBute only incorporates it three times: once with a car and a train, a second time with a door, and the third time with a train station and a car.

Some critics have commented that there isn’t enough footage of Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle. While I also would have enjoyed more scenes devoted to how Christabel mesmerized Randolph in the first place, the film is more focused on Maud Bailey and how her life is changed as a result of delving into the two lovers' past. One of the more profound lines in the film is something that Christabel says to Randolph before they push their mutual affection to its most intimate level. She tells him, "I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed."

Sadly, I finished watching “Possession” feeling something between burned and bored.

LaBute strikes out with his film, but Martha Fiennes (sister of Ralph and Joseph) possesses a more masterful command over “Onegin.” Also known as “Eugene Onegin” and based on Alexander Pushkin’s poem “Evgenii Onegin,” this period piece is about a Russian aristocrat (Ralph Fiennes) who catches the eye of a young woman named Tatyana Larina (Liv Tyler) but, in his contempt for life, does not realize he shares her feelings until it is too late. Lena Headey and Toby Stephens also star in “Onegin;” she Tatyana’s sister Olga, to whom he, Vladimir Lensky, is engaged. That Onegin would even enter the lives of these country folk—as he would call them—is entirely serendipitous. Upon inheriting a house and some land by his late uncle, Onegin moves to the country from St. Petersburg for a spell. He spies Vladimir “trespassing” on private property, becomes his “friend,” and then meets Olga and Tatyana.

With no needs, desires, or ambitions, whatever Onegin does is due to his having nothing better to do. Ralph Fiennes portrays this superficially unfeeling, ennui-soaked character wonderfully. Contrary to my initial assessment of Liv Tyler’s ability to step in the role of a Russian woman from the 19th Century, she performs very well and does not appear misplaced. In fact, in the Liv films I’ve seen—“Empire Records,” “Stealing Beauty,” “That Thing You Do!,” “Inventing the Abbotts,” “Armageddon,” “Plunkett & Macleane,” “Cookie’s Fortune,” and “The Lord of The Rings” trilogy—she has always exuded the right combination of naïveté and resolve to gain the viewer’s sympathy not pity.

LaBute’s and Fiennes’ films have equal caliber set pieces, and both succeed in creating a visually stunning environment for the characters, but “Onegin” surpasses “Possession” in the narrative department. The former is based on a novel-poem, the second on a novel. Perhaps the evaluation should not be focused on which film adaptation is superior, but which original work is of stronger merit. A Booker Prize-winning “fantasy” written by a contemporary English literary scholar cannot hold a flame to a narrative poem penned by one of the greatest Russian poets and father of modern Russian literature.

[Mary Frances]

Fiennes follows family footsteps

The Press (Canterbury, New Zealand)
June 9, 2000

As the director of Onegin, Martha Fiennes is the latest in the talented British family to make her mark in the world of film. Film-making seems to run in the blood of the very talented Fiennes family.

In making her feature-film directing debut with Onegin, Martha Fiennes was fortunate enough to have the support of two brothers -- noted British actor Ralph, who plays the title role, and Magnus, who composed the music.

Another brother, Joseph, is also an actor (Shakespeare in Love), but does not appear in this film. In fact, Martha's five brother and sisters have all gone into the arts, thanks to the guidance of their mother.

"We all do different things," she says. "I joke that our interest in the arts comes from not being allowed to watch TV, which was considered a corrupting influence."

Ralph is the oldest of the siblings, with Martha, now aged in her early 30s, the youngest.

"We were all born very close together. At one point, we were six children under the age of seven," Martha says.

Although her mother was a writer and painter, Martha thinks she got her interest in film from her father, a photographer. "We had a dark room, and I was playing with cameras since I was very small.

Martha graduated from film school in 1991, and became a commercials and music-video director.

She says her strong visual sense helped her in the making of the spectacular Onegin, which is based on Pushkin's poem-novel set in Tsarist Russia, Eugene Onegin.

Starting in St Petersburg in the 1820s, the story tells of the city's most eligible bachelor, Onegin, renowned for his cynicism in all matters of the heart. Having spent all his money, he inherits his uncle's country estate, where he meets the lovely Tatyana (Liv Tyler), whom he spurns with tragic consequences.

It was Ralph who first came to Martha with Pushkin's novel, about eight years ago, before he made Schindler's List, and they both agreed they would love to make it into a film.

To make the film, Martha spent five days shooting in St Petersburg, in minus-20-degree conditions. "All the interiors were shot in England, but we went to Russia seven times to research the sets," she says.

Martha is full of praise for American actress Liv Tyler (Stealing Beauty, Cookie's Fortune), who plays the strong-willed Tatyana. "Although Liv is not a technical actress, that is not the point. She stood out among the dozens of actresses we viewed on the audition tapes. The feeling that Liv was the right one was unanimous.

"I like her physicality -- she is very real. She stood out with her natural innocence and intuitive approach to acting. The fact that Ralph has years of experience on stage and film, and Liv is fresh and new, seemed to completely reflect the differences in the characters they are playing," Martha says.

[Mary Frances]

British Onegin makes Russians reel; Ralph Fiennes' film of a Pushkin classic was greeted in St Petersburg with shock - followed by admiration

By Tom Whitehouse
Reporting from St. Petersburg
The Guardian
May 31, 1999

'Ralph Fiennes is committing suicide," said Natalya Shkurenko, a shocked St Petersburg critic. 'Pushkin is ours. A foreigner simply cannot understand his work."

By producing and starring in a film adaptation of Eugene Onegin, the Russians' favourite work of literature by their most revered writer, Alexander Pushkin, Fiennes is sticking his neck out. Had he taken a film of the Koran to Iran, his audience would have been no less sceptical than was the case in St Petersburg yesterday.

After Onegin's press screening, the massed ranks of St Petersburg's underpaid critics and intellectuals arrived at Fiennes' press conference, determined to chop the impostor's head off.

'Thank for your efforts Mr Fiennes, but why did you make so many departures from the text?"

'How would you feel if a Russian had adapted Hamlet without including the soliloquy 'To be or not to be'?"

'Why did you make St Petersburg look so depressing?"

Sitting next to his sister, Martha, who directed Onegin, Fiennes replied with charm, determination and intelligence. 'It's a process of adaptation, not of replication," he explained.

Three and a half hours later, no blood had been spilt and no duels fought in defence of Pushkin's honour. Fiennes made heroic progress.

'The biggest thing one comes up against is their determination to compare the literature with the film, which is natural, of course, rather than respond to it as a film in its own right. Our challenge is to respond as film-makers," he said after his grilling.

To his pride and relief, St Petersburg's cultural commissars have included the Onegin film in this year's official celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Pushkin's birth.

'They could have decided not to take it. So that in itself has give a stamp of approval, whatever the critics might say."

Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is a classic story of passion, death and unrequited love, which is universally acknowledged as the 'encyclopaedia of Russian life".

Russian film directors have understandably kept their distance, further deterred from trying to adapt it by the condemnation that Tchaikovsky's operatic version received.

'You have to understand that Pushkin is a kind of pagan god in Russia," said Lev Luria, a St Petersburg critic.

'The Soviet authorities made things worse by trying to turn him into a political institution. People responded by telling rude jokes about him almost in the same way they told jokes about Lenin. Only now are we able to think of Pushkin as just a brilliant writer and Fiennes is contributing to this process."

Russia's businessmen are also helping debunk Pushkin by cashing in on the bicentenary. The chocolate company, Red October has launched a line of Pushkin chocolates. Coca-Cola is using a line of his poetry in one of its adverts. Smirnoff has produced a brand of Pushkin vodka.

'Thank God for all this kitsch," said Mr Luria. 'More reverence for Pushkin would suffocate him."

Yuri Luzhkov, the Moscow mayor and presidential hopeful, has raised portraits of Pushkin around ther city. Excerpts from his poems about Moscow are quoted underneath his image. Not to be outdone, Mr Luzhkov's St Petersburg counterpart, Vladimir Yakovlev, has done the same, quoting intead Pushkin's love for St Petersburg, where he grew up and first gained fame.

The anniversary celebrations will culminate on his birthday, June 6, when political, religious and artistic elites gather across the country for recitals and praise.

'It will be awful. They will try to recite him and no doubt make terrible mistakes," said Mr Luria. 'But Pushkin will survive. The great thing about him is that he can appeal to everyone but no one can own him."

Such is the variety of Pushkin's work that communists, nationalists, liberals, atheists and Christians can all embrace him. Though exiled to the Crimea for mixing with the Decembrist revolutionaries, Pushkin also praised the tsar. While some of his poems are bawdy, he was also devout. His death at the age of 38 was very Russian. Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel with a French officer whom he accused of insulting his wife.

Resentment at a British film star apparently gatecrashing this massive Pushkin party is perhaps understandable from a divided nation increasingly dependent on foreign aid. But some are also flattered and relieved.

' Fiennes is a great actor, who, thank God, has made a good film about Russia without the usual cliches of vodka and bears," said the film critic Danil Segal. ' Onegin is a lot better than the last James Bond."

Despite his stressful press conference, Fiennes returned the compliment. 'Their questions were very intelligent. They were not interested in Hollywood gossip."

But one journalist almost flummoxed him with a question on philosophy. Did he believe in the conclusion to Eugene Onegin that happiness was 'so possible' or did he subscribe to the view expresed in one of Puskhin's later poems that there was 'no happiness on earth, only tranquillity and will'?

'I'll go for the second option,' replied Fiennes amid laughter.

[Mary Frances]

Shooting Pushkin

By Ralph Fiennes
The New Yorker
June 7, 1999

To film "Eugene Onegin," the actor went in search of the Russian writer's ghost.

It is January 13, 1998, and I'm on the overnight train from Moscow to Pskov, sharing a two-berth compartment with Andrei, my guide and interpreter. Our final destination is Mikhailovskoye, the country estate of Alexander Pushkin: my sister Martha and I are making a film of "Eugene Onegin," and this is the only important place in Pushkin's life that I have yet to visit. "Eugene Onegin" (oh-NYAY-gen) has been haunting me ever since I was introduced to it, in 1984, by Lloyd Trott, a teacher at my drama school [RADA] who passionately encouraged us to widen our reading. I watched an actress in the year above mine perform Tatyana's letter as a monologue, at Lloyd's suggestion; when he told me where the speech had come from, I immediately borrowed the Charles Johnston translation from the school library.

Pushkin greatly admired the poetry of Byron, but he is without Byron's cynical aloofness. in fact, this quality is more an attribute of Pushkin's eponymous hero, an aristocratic dandy who becomes bored with the amorous intrigues of St. Petersburg society and moves to the estate of his recently deceased uncle, in the country. There he meets a neighbor, the poet Vladimir Lensky, and these two begin a friendship of opposites: Onegin's cynicism versus Lensky's idealism. Lensky introduces Onegin to his fiancé, Olga Lagrina, and to her sister Tatyana. Pushkin gently mocks Lensky's naiveté, but he is full of tender affection for his heroine, Tatyana, when she writes the cool Onegin a letter declaring her love for him. Onegin pointedly rejects Tatyana, however, and soon afterward his rustic idyll comes to an end when he arouses his best friend's anger by dancing continually with Olga at Tatyana's nameday celebration. Lensky impetuously challenges Onegin to a duel, and is killed.

Reading "Eugene Onegin" for the first time, I was struck by the complementary arcs of its hero and its heroine, and I found myself imagining it as a play or a film. Of course, I wanted to play Onegin. His is the tragedy of the cynic. In the final section of the poem, after years of self-imposed exile, Onegin meets Tatyana again at a ball in St. Petersburg; she is now a sophisticated woman, and Onegin falls obsessively in love with her. He pursues her, and eventually confronts her in her own home, where Tatyana tells him that, although she still cares for him, she will remain faithful to her husband. Pushkin leaves the reader of his poem a witness to the crushed figure of Onegin, alone and rejected.

The cinematic potential of the poem crystallized for me only when I was filming "The Cormorant," a BBC film in Wales, in 1992. While waiting between camera setups, I drew crude, story-board style pictures of scenes from "Onegin"; I then wrote a loose treatment and showed it to Martha. Slowly the idea of a film grew between us. The producer Ileen Maisel championed our initial outline and introduced us to the writer Michael Ignatieff, who immediately saw its possibilities. By December, 1994, he had written the first draft of the screenplay.

In April of 1997, I made my first trip to Russia, playing Chekhov's Ivanov at the Almeida Theatre Company's production, which toured in Moscow; I visited the local sites specifically associated with Pushkin before joining Martha in St. Petersburg, where she was scouting locations. As I learned more about Pushkin's life, I was struck by the peculiar way that it echoed his great poem. In 1824, the young poet was exiled to the family's country estate because of his liberal views and inflammatory behaviour, a year before the Decembrist uprising, in which several of his friends were executed or deported to Siberia. It was at Mikhailovskoye that he wrote many of the central passages of "Eugene Onegin." In 1826, Nicholas I granted Pushkin permission to return to Moscow, where he was forced to accept a somewhat humiliating rank in the Tsar's court. At that time, the poet pursued a Moscow beauty, Natalya Goncharova, who could never fully respond to his desire for her but agreed to marry him, in 1831. Several years later, when the couple was living in St. Petersburg, Natalya attracted the attention of a young French officer, George d'Anthes, and his unabashed interest in her provoked Pushkin's jealousy. in 1837--despised by the aristocracy but already acknowledged as a great writer--Pushkin was shot by d'Anthes in a duel over the honor of his wife.

All the great Russian writers defer to Alexander Pushkin, but for non-Russian speakers he is elusive. I don't speak Russian, and, while Pushkin's short stories are entertaining and lightly ironic in translation, in his great poetic works--"Onegin," "The Bronze Horseman," and "The Gypsies"--the language barrier seems to prevent a complete union of reader and poet: the sense of Pushkin's words is inevitably being adjusted to facilitate the rhyme. Vladimir Nabokove, in the foreword to his deliberately literal version of "Eugene Onegin," writes that it is impossible to translate the poem--that it is best to sacrifice "elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage, and even grammar" for something closer to Pushkin's line-by-line meaning. Nabokov's translation is non-rhyming verse form and, despite its eccentricities, his is the one I have come to like most. Nabokov also insists that anyone who really wishes to appreciate "Onegin" should learn Russian, and initially, I tried to take his advice. On the train to St. Petersburg, during my first visit, I would laboriously translate an odd line with the help of my Russian companions, but my only sense of achievement came from decoding Cyrillic letters; I couldn't' get near the sense of the poetry. Learning the Russian alphabet and a few phrases is one thing, but reading "Onegin" fluently in a short space of time--well, I couldn't. It was blithely ridiculous.

Now, on the train to Pskov, I am very happy to be cocooned in this compartment, leaving Moscow behind, mercifully free of telephones. And yet I am nervous about discussing the script of "Onegin" with Andrei. It has evolved slowly, and with difficulty, yet I tell myself that it has a coherence that it lacked before. Andrei quizzes me about our interpretation of the poem. He asks me why I think certain characters behave as they do. Pushkin is Russia's Shakespeare: to his countrymen, he is still alive, and the actions of his characters still provoke discussion and debate. Why doesn't Tatyana leave with Onegin? Does she really love her husband? Does Onegin really love Tatyana? I feel that my replies are inadequate, even though Martha and I have struggled with these questions for many hours.

Andrei goes to sleep, and I continue making notes on the script. Michael Ignatieff gave us a screenplay that was economical in exactly the way we wanted, but without Pushkin's commentary the poem's emotional clarity somehow eluded us. A young screenwriter, Peter Ettedgui, was instrumental in reshaping the material to reveal the arc of Onegin and Tatyana's relationship without losing the leanness that Michael had achieved. The greatest challenge is the dialogue: avoiding both pastiche and glaring contemporary idioms; finding the right tautness. After scrawling suggested amendments in black pencil, I sleep heavily for about four hours. At five in the morning, I wake up in a state of uncertainty and expectation, and try to imagine the landscape I'm passing through: I think of Pushkin's poem "Demons," in which spirits and devils pursue a sleigh at night, chasing it into limbo.

At 8:00 a.m. a radio is switched on from a central control somewhere on the train, and harsh, tuneless music forces us out of our beds. Soon the train stops: we have arrived at Pskov. It's still dark outside. We are greeted by Natasha, a striking woman with thick swaths of blonde hair. She has come from St. Petersburg with a driver and a minibus to take us to the estate. in the half-light, as we carry our bags across an ice-encrusted platform, a feeling of secret elation hits me. On the way to the minibus, I hear a metallic tapping behind me: a man is walking the length of the train, checking the wheels for metal fatigue. I cannot believe it: isn't this the same man who taps the wheels of the train when Greta Garbo's Anna Karenina arrives in Moscow? I stand watching him, and sense a peculiar blurring between the invented and the real.

Natasha has brought some breakfast for us: coffee in a flask, biscuits, bread, smoked salmon, ham, and cheeses. There is also some vodka. Drinking vodka in Russia is a reassuring inevitability. We draw up on the side of the road for twenty minutes to eat. The journey from St. Petersburg to Mikhailovskoye by horse and carriage took about six days in Pushkin's time. He would have stopped at roadside stations for the night; some of his letters were written during those overnight stops. The journey by road from Pskov to Mikhailovskoye takes about an hour and forty minutes, and as it gets brighter I can see the surrounding countryside more clearly. We pass frozen rivers, small villages of wooden houses that are painted different colors and decorated with carved woodwork. Some of these houses are warped by weather and time. I idly comment on their attractive simplicity. "You wouldn't last a night, I expect," Natasha says. "They are damp, with no water or plumbing, no electricity--and you would be smoked out by the stoves." The villages come and go between icy fields and stretches of silver birch and pine forest.

After driving for an hour and a half, we pull up in front of a run-down modern building. I am told that this is the conference center for Mikhailovskoye, which houses various Pushkin seminars and events. It is very desolate. Natasha goes inside to find our guide, and ten minutes later she returns with a friendly and enthusiastic-looking man, whom she introduces as Sasha. Sasha is the guardian of Mikhailovskoye. He gazes at us intensely, through glasses resting on his nose that soon turns pink the cold. There is a great warmth about him. Andrei is translating. He tells me that Sasha is speaking the most beautiful but slightly outdated Russian, and that he is addressing us "my angels." Sasha leans forward with purpose when I ask him questions, and his love for his work shines out of him. He quotes stanzas of "Onegin" by heart, and I wonder whether he carries the whole poem in his head.

We travel the short distance from the conference center to the estate of Mikhailovskoye itself, and park by a fence that marks the perimeter of the garden. I notice some builders' trucks, carpenters' tools lying by a shed, and a metal-framed bed propped up against a wall. Sasha tells us that Mikhailovskoye is being refurbished for the 1999 Pushkin bicentennial celebrations. The builders and decorators will stay here while they carry out their work. There has been no snowfall recently, and everything looks spare, naked and poor. In English, the word "estate" conjures up something quite substantial, even grand, but many Russian estates are quite modest.

As we walk through the gardens, the layout of Mikhailovskoye becomes clear. The house itself is a simple one-story wooden structure. On either side of it are two smaller building; one is a bathhouse, where Pushkin's nurse lived, and the other is the kitchen. Sasha explains that the house is not the actual building Pushkin lived in--that has been destroyed and rebuilt at least twice, this particular version having been constructed after the Second World War. The rooms are denuded of furniture. Things are being packed up for the refurbishment scheme, and big cases and tea chests occupy the center of the floor. I have already visited Pushkin's apartment in St. Petersburg, and although it was moving to walk through those rooms where Pushkin had lived, and to see the study where he wrote so many impassioned and impatient letters, it felt like a museum; its well-cared-for surfaces gave no suggestion of a home or a family life. Here, among the debris of storage boxes, tools, and midwinter detritus, I feel freer to reimagine Pushkin.

The house stands above the River Sorot. There is a steep bank from the doors at the back of the house to the river, which is partly frozen. We can see the small, dark silhouettes of fishermen on the ice, their lines disappearing through the holes they have drilled. Sasha tells us about a group of fishermen who were once caught on the ice as it broke up during a thaw and had to be helicoptered to safety. Did Pushkin stare out at the same antlike shapes poised above their fishing lines? Perhaps he walked down the steep path from the house and called to them on his way to the windmill, which lies about half a mile from the house. Pushkin carried a heavy stick with him when he walked, to keep his arm strong for holding a duelling pistol. There are many stories of duels fought by Pushkin as a young man--in one, he nonchalantly eats cherries as his opponent takes aim, fires, and misses.

As we head toward the frozen river, I am turning over in my mind the vast discrepancy between the immediate sensations of being here, absorbing Sasha's commentary, and the tortuous process of making a film. We are walking toward the windmill, and I ask Sasha if it has any connection with thewater mill at the site of the duel in "Onegin." He's not sure, but I ask him to describe the duel, the ritual--the events as Pushkin describes them. He punches a finger into the frozen snow at our feet. "Here is Onegin, here is Lensky, the barrier is here--about ten paces. They walk toward each other. Onegin fires first."



"Doesn't Lensky fire first?" I ask.

"No, no, Onegin," Sasha replies.

"Are you sure?" I say.

"Yes, yes, Onegin shoots first and kills him."

To my embarrassment, I see that I have been so preoccupied with the script that I have forgotten what changes we have made in key areas of the story. This moment is the beginning of an unwinding distrust within me about the way literature is adapted into film. Even with the best of intentions, this appropriation is often a distortion or a mutation for the sake of audience satisfaction and accessibility. Martha and I have tried to remain faithful to Pushkin's poem, but we have also been told that a contemporary audience may not sympathize with Onegin, or may not understand why Tatyana would write him a passionate love letter on the basis of one meeting: how are we to make these things credible?

In our script, Onegin arrives late for the duel, as he does in the poem, but he makes a substantial attempt at reconciliation, which Lensky refuses. Lensky then fires first and wounds Onegin,whereupon Onegin returns fire, but with a look of deep reluctance on his face. My conversation with Sasha at Mikhailovskoye spurs me to reexamine this scene, and, on reflection, our script seems a betrayal of the original. In the poem, Onegin is more glib, as if any show of remorse were a sign of weakness:

Malevolently now,
similar to hereditary foes,
as in a frightful, enigmatic dream,
they for each other, in the stillness,
prepare destruction coolly.

Onegin's "look of deep reluctance" in our screenplay now seems sentimental; the poem's portrayal of this confrontation is far more disturbing and realistic. Only when one man lies dead should the barbarity of the duel sink in--not before.

Weeks later, when we shoot the scene--by a small lake in the south of England--my misgivings return, and I am unable to give Onegin a moment of conscience immediately before he pulls the trigger. From my position on the jetty we have built, I see Martha, frustrated at my intransigence, gesticulating on the shore with the producers. I am caught between my strong instinct not to betray Onegin as I've come to see him and the call of collaboration with Martha, and I feel alternately guilty and determined. How Martha and I understand this scene will continue to change in the editing process, as we debate the many plausible versions of the duel, trying to convey the way in which the ritual imposes itself on the protagonists. In our final cut, the duel is almost a moment of time suspended, in which the characters have no choice.

After our walk around the grounds at Mikhailovskoye, Sasha takes us to a neighboring estate called Trigorskoye. This was the home of the Osipov family, and it has been suggested that the Osipovs provided inspiration for the Larins: there is a garden bench at Trigorskoye known as Tatyana's bench. Pushkin describes Tatyana rushing from the house to the privacy of the garden when she thinks that Onegin has come to respond to the letter. Suddenly, he appears before her and tells her that he cannot reciprocate her feelings and is not made for married life. Sitting on this legendary bench at Trigorskoye, I try to visualize their encounter.

Like Pushkin's home, Trigorskoye is being given a bicentennial spring cleaning: there are tractors, earthmovers, and piles of builders' rubbish. I know that in the coming summers many people will visit these places, and perhaps, over the years, they will acquire a patina of archival polish. But on this day, January 14, 1998, there is virtually no one here--there are only ghosts, and my visit is a loose ribbon of possible imaginings. I remember a pastel sketch by the Russian painter Serov, who portrayed the poet on horse back riding off into the country. In his sketch we see Pushkin hurrying away from us, perhaps to visit with the Osipovs, where he will meet Anna Petrovna Kern, with whom he is infatuated. Or maybe he is simply riding out to free his mind and to escape the claustrophobia of his home. I feel that I, too, may glimpse him at any moment.

Eight weeks later, we are shooting in St. Petersburg, and it is my first day of playing Onegin. I have set my alarm clock for an hour earlier than necessary: I want to read the poem one more time. We've brought fake snow with us, but I'm crossing my fingers that there will be no thaw, that the Neva will stay frozen, that the slight snowfall of the previous evening will have increased during the night. We are on a very tight shooting schedule. I glance out the window and uncross my fingers: the snow is falling thicker and thicker. The sky is a milky gray--a perfect light. Everywhere, the architecture of St. Petersburg is outlined in white, and seems to promise the world I have stared at in so many paintings.

Our morning's location is the Peter and Paul Fortress, a forbidding defensive embankment built by Peter the Great. The Neva is frozen. The dark shapes of the fortress and the white of the snow look extraordinary. No one can believe our luck. We don't speak of it. There is an atmosphere of concentration and purpose. The scene is relatively simple: Onegin, unsettled at having reencountered Tatyana, walks through the city alone. Each ritual of preparation for the shot is heavy with meaning for me; makeup, hair, wardrobe, actor are like pieces of a puzzle that are finally coming together to form Onegin. Later, I will be able to remember only images and sensations: the frozen river; Martha in her white fur hat and padded silver jacket; the camera crew all swathed in Arctic clothing; my top hat, flapping cloak, numb fingers, runny nose.

In an ideal world, Martha and I would have shot every frame in Russia, but we could afford to remain there only a week. In the end, we shot the frozen Neva twice: once in St. Petersburg, when it really was the Neva and it really was frozen, and once in Leavesdon, in Hertfordshire, England, on a disused airfield. There, using exaggerated perspective, our designer, Jim Clay, created a sleigh ride and a nineteenth-century ice-skating party. Our days in St. Petersburg were thrilling, but would an "Onegin" shot entirely on location have made a better film? Not necessarily. Not one scene of "Dr.Zhivago" was shot in Russia, and in an earlier adaptation of another Pushkin story--"The Queen of Spades"--St. Petersburg was replicated at Welwyn Studios, in North London. Constraints of money and time can fuel all the bizarre energies of cinematic artifice, giving it a reality that is more powerful because it must suggest what it cannot show.

By the end of March, Onegin's world is being recreated at Shepperton Studios, near London. One afternoon in April, my English agent, Larry Dalzell, comes to visit me there, and I ask him if he would like to see the set. I know they are filming the ballroom sequence, which is when Liv Tyler, as Tatyana, makes her entrance, having been transformed from a country girl into a St. Petersburg princess. I take Larry downstairs, through the heavy doors of the soundstage, and across some electric cables, to a small doorway onto a balcony from which one can look down onto the dance floor. He gasps as he takes in the scale of the set: the vast columns dwarf the dancers, and the floor is a kaleidoscope of uniforms and ballgowns.

There is an anticipatory moment of silence: Martha is about to go for a take. The assistant director, Tommy Gormley, calls for "playback," the music of the polonaise begins, and the room comes alive: people dance, talk, bow, acknowledge one another. Then, to our right, double doors open and Liv Tyler, serene and beautiful as Tatyana, walks into the room. People smile and step aside for her, and a Steadicam follows behind almost respectfully, like an unusual bodyguard. Larry sees no lights being rigged, no rehearsal, just an extraordinary fluid movement of camera and actor. This is cinema as theatre. Then the assistant director calls "Cut!" and the spell is broken.

During my visit to Mikhailovskoye, I could not have guessed how Pushkin's characters would beinterpreted and given life, or how the ballroom scene would look, or how the two scenes of rejection would find their balance in the film. Two months later, those experiences of walking through an avenue of linden trees in Pushkin's gardens with my Russian companions or taking turns photographing one another on Tatyana's bench seem like moments of innocence.

Our January pilgrimage with Sasha ends at the monastery where Pushkin is buried. Pushkin's tomb, which is outdoors, is covered with a kind of Perspex lid to protect it from frost, and it appears to be squeezed between the exterior wall of the church and the parapet that separates the churchyard from the road. Sasha tells us the authorities were nervous that the presence of Pushkin's coffin in St. Petersburg might lead to a popular--potentially inflammatory--display of grief, and so it was taken posthaste to Mikhailovskoye. Unlike all the monuments to Pushkin I have seen in St. Petersburg and Moscow, this tomb is plain and unadorned. Natasha has brought some flowers with her, and an apple. She gives us each a stem as an offering to Pushkin. Just before we move away, Natasha places her apple on the edge of the tomb.

I do not speak Russian, and I do not understand it, but I understand this gesture. It says that a dead writer can still be a contemporary writer--that he can move us now, at any moment. Changes of time, place, custom, manners, and language can alter our perspective on a great writer, but they cannot extinguish the power of his words on the page. Our film, however wayward, is a response to that power. In "Onegin," after all, the reader is addressed directly, as the poet's friend and partner. It's impossible to read Pushkin's intimate farewell at the poem's end and not feel that he is speaking to you personally:

Whoever you be, O my reader--
friend, foe--I wish with you
to part at present as a pal.
Farewell. Whatever you in my wake
sought in these careless strophes--
tumultuous recollections,
relief from labours,
live pictures or bon mots,
or faults of grammar--
God grant that you, in this book
for recreation, for the daydream,
for the heart, for jousts in journals,
may find at least a crumb.
Upon which, let us part, farewell!

[Mary Frances]

Hi All!

For those of you are interested in such things, just a note to let you know that Onegin was filmed at the estate, Northington Grange, in England. This information comes from the website, English Heritage.

Enjoy!

I remain,

With Kind Regards,

Mary

[Mary Frances]

STARZ! Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films Establish Groundbreaking Pact to Theatrically Release 'Onegin' in December.

PR Newswire
November 8, 1999

Limited Theatrical Release in New York and Los Angeles Qualifies

Ralph Fiennes and Siblings' Film for Oscar Contention

STARZ! to Present World Television Premiere in February

ENGLEWOOD, Colo., Nov. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- STARZ! Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films announce a landmark window strategy for the film "Onegin": A limited, Oscar(R)-qualifying theatrical release of "Onegin" beginning December 17, 1999, in Los Angeles and December 22, 1999, in New York, followed by the Pay Television premiere on STARZ! on Saturday, February 5, 2000 at 8:00 p.m. (ET/PT) and then an expanded theatrical release beginning in April 2000.

According to Robert Leighton, president of Encore Entertainment Group, "STARZ! Pictures is breaking from its traditional window sequencing by initiating this unique theatrical release of "Onegin", just weeks preceding our Pay TV premiere. This innovative venture should broaden the value of this film for our audiences, as well as provide Oscar(R) attention to the film and the talent behind it, especially the Fiennes family."

"Onegin" marks the motion picture directorial debut of Martha Fiennes, sister of Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, and features an original score by their brother, Magnus Fiennes. The story was adapted for the screen by Peter Ettedgui and Michael Ignatieff, and was produced by Ileen Maisel and Simon Bosanquet.

"Onegin", starring Ralph Fiennes (An English Patient, Schindler's List) and Liv Tyler (Armageddon, Cookie's Fortune), is based on the epic poem by Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, entitled Eugene "Onegin". Set against the backdrop of 19th century St. Petersburg, "Onegin" tells the story of unrequited love between aristocrats. In her recent review for Screen International, Sheila Johnston calls "Onegin", "a rhapsodic piece which not only looks breathtaking, but also achieves and sustains a blazing emotional intensity." "Onegin" was selected as the closing night film at this year's Toronto Film Festival.

Samuel Goldwyn Films, LLC is the production and distribution arm of The Samuel Goldwyn Company. The new company, with much of its veteran team still intact, continues the classic Samuel Goldwyn tradition with an impressive slate of provocative and thought provoking films.

In November 1998, Encore Media Group LLC's (EMG) STARZ! established a new STARZ! Pictures monthly franchise with the world premiere of Let It Be Me starring Jennifer Beals and Patrick Stewart. STARZ! Pictures airs a world premiere film every month featuring some of Hollywood's most famous names. Other recent STARZ! Pictures include Funny Valentines starring Alfre Woodard, Free Money starring Marlon Brando, The Tic Code starring Gregory Hines and Gideon starring Charlton Heston.

[Mary Frances]

Wistful Fiennes on Location in St. Petersburg

By Valera Katsuba
Moscow Times
March 11,1998

ST. PETERSBURG - British actor Ralph Fiennes has been walking moodily around Russia's second city this week, shooting location scenes for "Eugene Onegin," a film set in 19th century Russia based on Alexander Pushkin's poetic romance.

Fiennes, the Academy Award-nominated star of "The English Patient" and "Schindler's List," arrived in St. Petersburg late last week for the shoot, which began Saturday on the ice-covered Gulf of Finland and included location filming at the Peter and Paul Fortress on Monday and the Kazan Cathedral on Tuesday.

Fiennes is the film's executive producer and will play the title role of Onegin, Pushkin's ironic romantic anti-hero. His sister, Martha Fiennes, will be making her directorial debut on the film.

Most of the film will be shot in Britain, and only exterior shots will be filmed here. The locations will be used to capture authentic shots of the perennially bored Onegin wandering the streets of St. Petersburg or journeying to find himself in the countryside.

Of the principal characters, only Fiennes made the trip to Russia for filming. The remainder of the footage will be shot on location in England and in the studios.

The Fiennes brother-and-sister team attended a reception at the home of British Consul John Guy last Friday to kick off the week of filming. Fiennes traveled to Moscow last April for the Chekhov Theater Festival when he starred in a stage version of Chekhov's "Ivanov" by London's Almeida Theater.

Fiennes was dubious about the appeal of "Eugene Onegin" worldwide, especially in the United States. "Maybe (the film will raise interest) in Russia, but I can see a slight problem with the distribution of the film in America," Fiennes said, referring to the poem's rather un-Hollywood ending.

"As you know, the main heroine of the novel, Tatyana, leaves Onegin, and Onegin kills his friend (Lensky)."

It's hard to imagine, however, that Russian audiences would not flock to see Fiennes playing in the Pushkin classic, which every Russian student is required to read and virtually memorize.

The British company Onegin Productions Limited is producing the film with on -location help in St. Petersburg from the Russian production company Globus. Valery Yermolayev, director of Globus, also successfully worked on the James Bond film "Goldeneye," part of which was shot in St. Petersburg in 1995.

St. Petersburg and Moscow were also recently used for location shots in a film version of Lev Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina."Sara Keene, publicity director for Onegin Productions Limited, said the decision to make most of the film in Britain was based on financial considerations. "It is more expensive for us to film the whole film in Russia, and less expensive to film the interior shots in studios in the U.K.," said Keene. "It's a question of budget."

Keene had only good things to say about filming here.

"The weather is perfect for the film," she said of the work the combined English and Russian crews were doing Monday. "It's snowing at Peter and Paul Fortress; it looks beautiful."

Tatyana Larina will be played by Liv Tyler, known for her roles in "Stealing Beauty" and "Everyone Says I Love You."

Lensky will be portrayed by Toby Stephens. Lena Headay, who will appear in the role of Olga, has established her reputation in British films such as "The Face" and the forthcoming "Mrs. Dalloway."

Keene would not disclose the film's projected release date, as "Eugene Onegin" does not yet have a distributor.

[Mary Frances]

Filming Russia's Sacred Text

The Economist
May 22-28, 1999

Russians on June 6th will mark the bicentenary of the birth of Alexander Pushkin, their most famous poet. A highpoint of the celebrations will be the opening of a Brish film of "Eugene Onegin".

For Russians Alexander Pushkin's great verse novel "Eugene Onegin" is so sacred a text that even Tchaikovsky hesitated before embarking on an opera taken from the book. The composer had to overcome not only his fear of the critics-among them the great Turgenev, who had once said he would give both little fingers for one line of the the poem and who was indeed scathing about the subsequent libretto. Tchaikovsky had also to confront an ominous personal drama that almost stifled the opera at birth.

As the composer laboured to make music out of Pushkin's tragic tale-the rejection of an epistolary declaration of love which is later regretted-he received an unexpected love letter of his own from one of his students at the music conservatory. Convinced that this was an act of fate and determined not to make the same mistake as Onegin, Tchaikovsky, who was homosexual, responded to the letter and proposed to its author, Antonina Milyukova. The distratrous 11 weeks of marriage that followed pushed Tchaikovsky to the very brink of sanity, and it was only the arragement of a hasty annulment that allowed the composer to put aside thoughts of suicide and concentrate on completeing his operatic masterwork.

The reverence and passion which Pushkin's work inspired in Russians was not something that Ralph Fiennes knew about when he first read "Eugene Onegin" 15 years ago as a student at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Like almost everyone who falls on this book for the first time, he was simply mesmerised by the emotional intensity and structural clarity of the story. He had student fantasies of an adaption, with himself, naturally, in the psychologically demanding role of Onegin. It was not until the 1990s, when he was set for international stardom, had experienced a brief, failed marriage of his own and was taking a serious interest in Russian culture, that Mr. Fiennes set about realising that dream.

It has been a long time arriving, and at times, it must have seemed as if it would never come off. But later this month, the Fiennes film, "Onegin" premieres in St Petersburg as part of the festivities marking the bicentenary of Pushkin's birth. Not only is "Onegin" the first film version of the famous work, so far as the producers know. It marks a directorial debut, too, for Martha Fiennes, Mr. Fiennes's sister, and the birth of a creative partnership between no fewer than three siblings in the Fiennes family.

"Ralph literally came to tea one afternoon clutching the Penguin Classic," says Ms Fiennes, who is a more relaxed and expansive character than her older brother. "He insisted that I read this fantastic poem by Pushkin which he thought would make a brilliant film. And so I read it and immediately agreed with him sensing that, within the simplicity and elegance of the story, there were great dimensions and layers of meaning that were potent and intriguing."

It took the two nearly as long to make the film of "Onegin" as the eight years it took Pushkin to write it. Years were spent working on a screenplay with Michael Ignatieff and Peter Ettedgui, which would stay true to the integrity of Pushkin's intensions while filling in the many sketchy parts of the original plot. An early decision was taken not to try to create a film equivalent for the poem's witty and discursive narrator. And of course there was a struggle to find the £14m ($23m) needed to finance it, not to mention the time in Mr. Fiennes's increasingly pressurised schedule. As the film gestated he was nominated for no fewer than two Oscars; his sister won a reputation for directing visually distinctive commercials and pop videos, as well as finding time to have two babies, who stomp loudly about her London house as she describes the film; and Magnus, the film's third Fiennes, with the music credit, made a name for himself as a producer, classical composer and writer of pop songs.

Ignoring the inevitable gossip, Mr. Fiennes chose his untried sister to direct because he wanted a "kindred spirit" for his cherished project. He had just finished a film adaption of a book which, while no "Onegin", was a literary work he felt had been overcompromised on its way to the screen. And besides admiring Ms Fiennes's visual style, he felt he could rely on her to help him steer "Onegin" through the rapids of the film market while retaining some kind of artistic fidelity to Pushkin's original.

This was no easy task. Interpreting and translating, let alone filming, this classic is the stuff of literary warfare inside Russia and out. By the time he had finished it in 1831, Pushkin had no doubt that "Onegin" was his finest work. But it was not until after his death six years later-killed in a duel like the poet in the story-that it was widely recognised as a masterpiece. Vissarion Belinsky, a great Russian critic, praised it as "an encylopedia of Russian life". Since then it has been claimed by Slavophiles and westernisers, by religious and secular critics, by Communists and anti-Communists. Some has treated it as a formal tour de force in which "nothing happens, twice", others as a dazzling meditation on the writer's craft. But, whatever else it is, "Onegin" is a heartrending story of failed love between Eugene and Tatyana.

Onegin is a "lishny chelovek"--a "spare" or "superfluous" man. Bored and cynical about his life as a Petersburg dandy, Onegin dreads country life even more as he is summoned to the deathbed of his uncle. On arrival, he finds that his uncle is already dead and that he is a master of a large estate. Perversely deciding to stay, Onegin is drawn despite himself into a minuet of Russian country life. He befriends Lensky, a poet, who introduces him to Olga Larin, his pretty but shallow fiancee, and to Tatyana, her sister, who falls deeply in love with him.

Inspired by the novels she reads to heed the call of her heart, Tatyana writes Onegin a passionate delcaration of love. He rejects her, flirts with Olga instead and, when challenged by him to a dual, kills his friend, Lensky. Years later, he meets Tatyana again. She is now a married grande dame, and it is his turn to write letters of adoration-and Tatyana's, depites her love, to reject him.

Mr. Fiennes, who plays Onegin with stylish intensity, remains preoccupied by the character. He is fascinated, he says, by "the journey of a man who spurns the world and is cynical about it, and whose cynicism is based on a kind of honesty." But he wonders if he should not have made him out to be more actively wicked.

Viewers of this lushly made film may at first find Liv Tyler miscast as Tatyana, a passionate and prototypical heroine of Russian literature, because her robust, steak-fed physique brings Texas to mind more than early 19th-century Russia. But in the end they will probably be moved by the coltish quality of gawky beauty which she brings to the part and which feels just right for a wild-spirited country girl.

Vladimir Nabovok, who himself translated "Eugene Onegin", described its intricate rhyme scheme as a spinning ball; the patterns blurs with speed in the middle, but is slower and more visible at the edges. The film does not even attempt to replicate Pushkin's verse, but it does combine that quality of simultaneous stillness and speed. For while the action of the plot moves very fast, the memorable moments in the film are to do with the detail, picked out and filmed lovingly, lavishly, and often in slow motion.

Besides is St Petersburg premiere, "Onegin" opens in Britain the autumn. The producers are still looking for an American distributor. Perhaps they should rename it "Onegin in Love".

[Mary Frances]

Russians ridicule Fiennes version of Pushkin classic

By Marcus Warren
The Telegraph
May 31, 1999

RALPH FIENNES suffered the consequences of taking liberties with Russia's national poet yesterday when his new film version of Pushkin's classic novel Eugene Onegin was ridiculed for a series of historical howlers.

Last night's premiere in St Petersburg was hailed as Britain's contribution to festivities for the 200th anniversary of Pushkin's birth next Sunday. But Saturday's press showing turned into a game of "spot the mistake".

At one stage the audience hooted with laughter and burst into mock applause when a young lady of the early 19th century Russian aristocracy launched into a song from a notorious Stalin-era propaganda film. Not only was the song first performed by a choir of collective farm girls in the 1950 movie Cossacks From the Kuban, it is also a firm favourite at drunken parties in today's Russia.

Fiennes, who plays the title role and is also executive producer, played down the slip at a press conference yesterday, saying: "I trust you saw that Onegin looked bored when he heard that song from the Soviet period."

However, the 36-year-old British star had been a good deal less relaxed when the gaffe was pointed out to him on Saturday. According to one onlooker, "he turned as white as a sheet". There was more laughter from the audience when it read a clumsy Russian translation in subtitles of the English prose version of some of the novel's most famous lines of poetry.

Eugene Onegin - which tells of unrequited love, cynicism and a duel in upper-class society at the beginning of the last century - was Russia's first proper novel and Pushkin the father of the country's literary language. So Fiennes had been understandably nervous about how ordinary Russians would take to his £11 million adaptation, called simply Onegin.

"They know it so well, it's almost like making changes in the Gospel story," Fiennes said last week. His fears were proved right. Members of Saturday's audience - who, like most educated Russians, knew huge passages by heart - said they were distracted by the film's anachronisms and departures from the original text.

One journalist likened the cutting of the famous dream by the novel's main heroine, Tatyana - played by Liv Tyler - to axing Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy. Elsewhere in the film the characters dance to a waltz immediately recognisable as dating from the beginning of this century; Tatyana's name-day ball is held in summer, instead of January; and she marries a young, rather than grey-haired, husband.

The slips overshadowed what for many members of the audience was a hugely enjoyable piece of cinema and an electrifying performance by Fiennes himself. However, at least one Pushkin scholar hated the film, which is directed by Fiennes's sister, Martha, and compared it unfavourably to Tchaikovsky's opera based on the novel.

"The British film-makers have carried out a more radical experiment than Tchaikovsky: they have subtracted not just the author but the poetry from Pushkin's novel," complained Leonid Dubshan. "All that is left is something comparable in the wretchedness of its plot with a fairy tale. The film's creators have committed a profound act of anti-culture."


THE RESPONSE OF RALPH FIENNES AND MARTHA FIENNES


Letter to the Editor: A Russian hit

The Daily Telegraph (London)
June 3, 1999


SIR - We were disappointed to read your one-sided coverage of Russian reactions to our film Onegin (report, May 31). The claim that Russians have ridiculed our adaptation for its inaccuracies completely ignores the fact that most Russians have responded with great enthusiasm.
While we acknowledge the iconic status of Pushkin in Russia and the inevitable suspicion of a foreigner's interpretation, much of the critical reaction has praised the film because it is not a replica but a genuine cinematic response to the spirit of Eugene Onegin.

The Cultural Committee of St Petersburg, guardians of the city's artistic heritage, saw the film before giving it their approval and inviting us to be part of the city's official celebration of Pushkin's bicentenary. In the national daily Kommersant, Mikhail Brashinsky writes: "The film stands outside Pushkin but alongside it and this is what makes it a delight." The St Petersburg Vedemosti agreed: "The film-makers show respect for and commitment to their source material."

RALPH FIENNES

MARTHA FIENNES

Moscow

[Mary Frances]

Fiennes' `Onegin' gaffes lead to media cold war

By Nick Holdworth
Hollywood Reporter
June, 1999

MOSCOW _ Stung by criticism of musical anachronisms in Ralph Fiennes' new film ``Onegin,'' the producers, Seven Arts, tried in vain to restrict press access to the world premiere in Moscow Thursday.

The film, directed by Fiennes' sister Martha Fiennes, is based on the verse novel ``Eugene Onegin'' by Russia's most famous author, Alexander Pushkin, and it opened in Moscow just before celebrations begin Sunday marking the 200th anniversary of the poet's birth.

But criticisms published in some British newspapers this week following a special screening in St. Petersburg, so upset the producers that they tried to prevent Western reporters from attending the premiere.

An invited audience of art critics and literary specialists in St. Petersburg were shocked by what some said was an anachronistic musical score in the film. In one scene, set in early 19th century Russia, characters at a country house are seen singing a song most Russians think of as a folk tune from the 1930s.

``Oh, Let's Run to Pick Berries in the Forest,'' was a popular song in Stalin's time and to the Russian ear, a glaring anachronism. The ``Manchurian Waltz,'' heard in some ballroom scenes, is also strongly connected with the 1940s, Russians say, as it is often heard in old World War II movies. Reports in several London dailies suggesting that the Fiennes' movie had committed a faux pas as Russia prepares for nationwide celebrations of their national poet's anniversary, caused consternation among members of the film's team in Russia for the premiere.

A British embassy reception Wednesday night, at which Ralph and Martha Fiennes, distributors and producers were present, was marred when Seven Arts president Daniel Diamond attempted to retrieve tickets given out to journalists among the guests.

Diamond, worried by negative coverage in the British press, told The Hollywood Reporter that the Russian premiere was a special event paying tribute to Pushkin's anniversary and press reviews were not welcome before the film's release in Britain and America, likely to be in the fall or later.

But Russian newspaper, radio and television journalists had already been allowed unrestricted access to a press screening of the movie earlier in the week.

Seven Arts' efforts to restrict access failed, but according to Russian members of the audience at the Pushkinsky Film Theatre in central Moscow Wednesday night, the producers have nothing to fear.

The film follows the plot of Pushkin's story reasonably faithfully _ charting the tortured relationship between the bored dandy Eugene Onegin and the beautiful aristocrat Tatiana. Only brief laughter rippled through the audience of more than 1,500 when the anachronistic song appeared.

After the screening, most people said they had enjoyed the film, specially dubbed from English into Russian at Mosfilm over the last three days.

``I was puzzled at first because it's not really the `Onegin' I know,'' said one young woman. ``But once I realized that this was an English view of the story, even though it was all shot in Russia, I really began to enjoy it.''

Most modern Russian productions of Pushkin's work take far more liberties than using songs that have a modern connotation for viewers, Moscow playwright Elena Gremina said.

``The film grasped something really very important about Pushkin's intonation,'' she added. ``They kept the Pushkin mystery and it left one feeling emotional, which is exactly how Pushkin should be.''

Ralph Fiennes, who introduced the film speaking in fluent Russian, stressed the film was an English interpretation of Pushkin, which had been made with ``great love.''

Diamond of Seven Arts insisted that the director knew the song was popular in the 1930s, but was aware it had much older roots. It had been used because it fitted the scene and the characters portrayed and there were no plans to redub the song, he said.

[Mary Frances]

Mr Fiennes changes hats Although there's a lot riding on Ralph Fiennes' new film, Eugene Onegin, Sheila Johnston finds him to be a far cry from the tortured soul he's so often portrayed

by Sheila Johnson
The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
November 14, 1999

IN HIS time Ralph Fiennes has been a man of many hats. The soft broad-brimmed trilbies of the Forties, the bowler, the military cap: these and more have perched at some point atop the aquiline visage, for he has majored in costume roles as epic, romantic, tragic types who call for the gravitas of a crowning accessory. Now, however, Fiennes is wearing a different hat: an executive producer's one.

The occasion is Onegin, based on Alexander Pushkin's verse novel about a world-weary libertine who spurns love when it is offered, then finds love spurning him. Fiennes also plays the title role, brooding and smouldering magnificently, and even carrying off an unflattering stovepipe number. He has a fair bit riding on the film, and has consequently been on the festival trail, taking Onegin to Russia, to North America, and to San Sebastian in Spain, where I met him.

Despite all this, an audience with him is shrouded in a veil of faint anxiety. His publicist sits on the phone to London, conducting brisk damage-limitation on the latest rumour about Fiennes's relationship with the actress Francesca Annis, a constant inspiration for gossip columnists. Meanwhile we have all been quizzed on Onegin (only enthusiasts need apply for an interview), though, since everyone was genuinely impressed, for once this did not require us to compromise our high professional ethics.

"I'm intrigued by a whole mix of things in Russia," says Fiennes, who went there to film parts of Onegin as well as taking the Almeida Theatre production of Chekhov's Ivanov to Moscow two years ago.

"There's an incredible warmth and a sense of celebration, a love of you because you love coming to them, a fascination with the West and a rejection of it. They will talk about big issues very quickly; they don't hang around to have polite, delicate conversations. They will say, `Oh, Ralph, you understand the Russian soul.' "

Fiennes loves the big issues. Complex, intelligent, serious, secretive, prickly: these are the adjectives that inhabit his cuttings file. But could they be only half the story? "He has this reputation of being very gloomy, but he's not nearly as melancholy as people think," says Jonathan Kent, who directed his Ivanov and his Hamlet and counts him as a personal friend.

In person Fiennes is elegantly formal - a little tense, perhaps - but with a hint of mischievous humour. He speaks thoughtfully and courteously, even when thrown touchy questions like why, despite his affinity for the Russian soul, reports had sped back from the film's premiere in St Petersburg last May that Pushkin scholars were pouring scorn on its deviations from the text.

"In a way our ignorance was bliss. We didn't speak Russian and, although you can read on the page that Onegin is a great Russian classic, you don't fully appreciate that until you encounter a press conference of people who are almost saying, `Who do you think you are?' I was told no Russian would dare make a film of it - it's so woven into their mentality as only a poem. And I can sort of see that."

Fiennes made Onegin a family affair, bringing in two of his six siblings: his brother, Magnus, to write the score and his sister, Martha, to direct. Since the latter had made many commercials and music videos but had no feature-film experience, she was a provocative choice.

"I'd been developing film projects as well as making chocolate commercials: I don't want people to think I'm obsessed with slick and snazzy looks," points out Martha, whose ad portfolio includes Strepsils and Archers Peach Schnapps. "But I'm completely aware of what a break it was for me. And I remember the producers saying, `We've got to handle this really carefully - it looks like he's bringing his kid sister in.' "

"Oh yeah, oh yeah, absolutely," says her big brother. "That was an ongoing underground current: could she deliver? It was another reason for my title of executive producer. I was saying, `Well yes, actually, she can.' I was able to stand by her when things got difficult, which they always do. It wasn't easy to raise the money but I had a sort of profile because of The English Patient."

FIENNES's presence in award-friendly, commercially profitable movies such as The English Patient and Schindler's List has earned him two Oscar nominations and made him moderately bankable.

But there have also been roles - his morally suspect academic in Quiz Show, his seedy hustler in Strange Days, his gangly, carrot-haired gambler in Oscar and Lucinda - which reminded the money men that his name alone can't carry a movie.

And, while each of those three films was an interesting succes d'estime if not a box-office hit, Fiennes was last seen on screen in The Avengers, with which he attracted the worst reviews of his career.

One critic rather rudely said he looked like Stan Laurel. Indeed the bowler was possibly a hat too far. Nobody wears them these days except for nerds like Bristow, the City drone in the Evening Standard cartoon strip, the Spillers flour-graders and the little mustachioed taxman on the Inland Revenue's ad campaign.

Fiennes has the grace not to display a flicker of irritation when the film is mentioned. "I thought it would be wonderful to play someone as confident and as uncomplicated as John Steed," he explains evenly.

"As Jeremiah Chechnik [the director] said, this was my chance to play someone who, when he walks into the room, likes who he is. At the time I was one of a number of people who wanted to replicate the original series, but with the benefit of hindsight our mistake was to be too faithful." The quality of Fiennes's performance in the movie is hard to assess amid the overall chaos, but he's clearly a good deal more comfortable gazing longingly at Mrs Peel than doing the debonair, umbrella-twirling stuff. His forte is tortured souls - men who don't much like who they are.

Asked "Why Onegin?", he answers, "Pushkin says in one of the stanzas, `Who is he? Is he an angel? Is he a devil? Or is he just a charlatan?' He's almost unknowable. He's someone who's a bit lost and cut off, and he has removed himself from engaging with society and people. There's a line in the film that I really like, when he says, `I'm not at home anywhere.' "

A deathly calm followed The Avengers (apart from a voiceover for the animated film Prince of Egypt), but Fiennes is about to become ubiquitous. Two more films are imminent: Sunshine, by Istvan Szabo, the director of Mephisto, in which he plays three men from different generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, and Neil Jordan's version of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, in which Fiennes's novelist has a fling with a married woman during the Blitz.

Next spring he will wear the hollow crown as Richard II at the historic (though soon-to-be redeveloped) Gainsborough film studios in London, a role he takes in repertory with Coriolanus. The two plays are being paired, says Kent, who is directing them, because, albeit written at opposite ends of Shakespeare's life, both are "about men of power who are incapable of exercising those powers properly".

"Coriolanus," he adds, "is a man who has a single-minded sense of duty and responsibility, and finds an almost samurai release in war but finds the small change of peacetime politicking distasteful. It's a good role for Ralph because he has a fastidiousness and fineness of spirit, a very pure sense of what he's about."

Will Fiennes ever make a full-blown comedy? Kent reckons he'd be "wonderful in a David Hare play" (which doesn't wholly answer the question), and cites a fundraiser in New York at which Fiennes read excerpts from P. G. Wodehouse. His silly-ass act apparently slayed the Americans. "The audience had to be helped from the auditorium," recalls Kent.

But he adds that their universal collapse might have been from amazement as much as amusement.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv_and_radio/story/0,,290361,00.html

Hear this

By Isobel Montgomery
The Guardian
June 10, 1999

Ralph Fiennes went one better than most in the celebrations of Pushkin's 200th anniversary - he is the star of a forthcoming film version of the great Russian poet's satirical tragedy, Eugene Onegin.
An interval talk on Radio 3 (8.35pm) is a portrait of Pushkinskaya, the Moscow Square where the city's famous statue of the poet stands. Ralph Fiennes will be reading from Eugene Onegin. No swooning at the back there, please. The main event - on either side of Pushkinskaya - is Tchaikovsky's opera, Mazeppa (7.30pm), based, of course, on a short story by Pushkin.

[Mary Frances]

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Exclusive/0,,55706,00.html

Fiennes caught Pushkin the press around

The Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Friday June 4, 1999

The unveiling of the new British film, Onegin, to a St Petersburg was always going to be a tense affair. The film has been adapted by Ralph Fiennes from the verse novel, Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. St Petersburg's favourite son also happens to be celebrating his 200th birthday this Sunday.

The tension clearly got to the film's producers, Seven Arts. According to the Hollywood Reporter, they were so incensed by the press reaction following a special screening in St Petersburg, that they tried, and failed, to exclude Western journalists from yesterday's world premiere in Moscow.

The press homed in on a number of inaccuracies in the film, such as the inclusion of a Stalinist drinking song in a story set in the early 19th century setting. Fiennes tried to shrug off the criticism saying: "I trust you saw that Onegin looked bored when he heard that song from the Soviet period."

The apparent gaffe seemed to have little impact on the audience, Nikita Mikhalkov, the Oscar-winning director of Burnt by the Sun, told The Times: "It's a different Pushkin. But it is obviously produced by people who have deep respect and love of his work. There was a very good feeling to the film. I respected it very much."

The film is pretty much a family affair for Fiennes. It's directed Ralph's sister Martha, and the music is composed by brother Magnus. The producers must be ruing the fact that the Fiennes' clan have yet to infiltrate the press.