Onegin





Philip French
Guardian Unlimited
November 21, 1999



Martha Fiennes's feature debut, Onegin, drops the poetry, the digressions and the author's presence as narrator and participant from Alexander Pushkin's great verse novel of 1831. She then proceeds to dress the bare bones with sumptuous stylised costumes. The result is a handsome, sometimes enigmatic period movie.

One can see what attracted the director's brother, Ralph Fiennes, to Onegin. This aloof malcontent has much in common with the characters he played in Schindler's List, Quiz Show, The English Patient and Oscar and Lucinda. Now he brings his formidable presence to Pushkin's languid aristocrat.

Onegin spurns the romantic country girl Tatyana (Liv Tyler) who declares her love for him, provokes a duel that leads to the death of a friend, goes into exile and returns to find life changed and the woman he loves out of reach.

This sounds like a garbled version of Hamlet, a stage role Fiennes played with distinction, and one recalls that in 1860 Turgenev, Pushkin's follower, delivered a famous lecture called 'Hamlet and Don Quixote', in which he claimed that mankind was divided into two types - introspective people incapable of action and men of action incapable of sustained thought. The tortured Onegin clearly belongs in the former category.

Onegin is full of beautiful, often breathtaking images, starting with Fiennes crossing the snow-covered countryside in a troika. The duel is staged on a jetty on a misty lake (oddly, Tatyana gets to witness it and, presumably to make him more sympathetic, Onegin doesn't fire the first shot). The final scenes in St Petersburg and the heartbreaking last meeting between Tatyana and Onegin in an austere room in her palatial townhouse are handled with great verve.









 

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