Anna Karenina

This week we'll be screening Anna Karenina, a film which I missed while out on general release, but which was definitely on my "must see" list.

Here are my notes:

Anna Karenina

 UK 2012                      130 minutes

Director:                      Joe Wright

Starring:                        Aaron Johnson, Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Domhnall Gleeson, Matthew MacFadyen

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for four Oscars (including Cinematography and Soundtrack)
• A further eight wins and 19 nominations (including BAFTA nomination for Best British Film)

 “Wright's movie is a dazzling affair, a highly stylised treatment of a realistic novel, superbly designed by Sarah Greenwood and edited by Melanie Ann Oliver, with rich photography by Seamus McGarvey, sumptuous costumes by Jacqueline Durran and a highly romantic Tchaikovskian score by Dario Marianelli, all previous Wright collaborators.”

Philip French

Anna Karenina (Keira Knighley) is an aristocrat in Russian high society at the end of the nineteenth century.  When she meets the affluent Count Vronsky (Aaron Johnson) she enters into a love affair that has life-changing consequences.

There have been numerous TV and film adaptations of Tolstoy’s novel, with actresses as diverse as Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Jacqueline Bisset and Nicola Pagett all having played the title role, and the resulting adaptations have borne a greater or lesser degree of fidelity to the original story.  Tom Stoppard’s objective, as he worked on his adaptation of the  800 page novel,  was to produce a script that would “deal seriously with the subject of love” as it applies to several pairs of characters: not just the relationship of Anna and Vronsky, but also Anna’s relationship with her husband (Jude Law) as well as the parallel shy relationship between Levin (Domhnall Gleeson)   and Kitty (Alicia Vikander) which Tolstoy himself intended to run as a quiet counterpoint to the passion of Anna’s affair.  Joe Wright filmed the script that Stoppard had written, but having failed to find authentic locations for the Moscow and St Petersberg scenes, decided to set these scenes within a dilapidated 19^th century Russian theatre which became a large-scale image of the upper-class tsarist society amongst which Anna and Vronsky carried on their affair.

After beginning his career in television Joe Wright made his name in the cinema with an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (2005) which won him a BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer and which starred Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet.  He worked with Knightley again on the multi-Oscar nominated Atonement (2007).  The Soloist (2000), the true story of a homeless classically –trained musician, marked a clear change of direction.  His previous project was another change of direction: Hanna is the story of a 16-year-old girl, raised by her father to be the perfect assassin, who is dispatched on a mission across Europe, while being pursued by a ruthless intelligence agent and her operatives.  Following Anna Karenina Joe Wright is about to make his debut as a stage director with a production of Pinero’s Trelawney of the Wells which is about to open in London.

Here's the trailer:

Never Let Me Go

Here are my notes for this week's film:

Never Let Me Go

UK 2010                      103 minutes

Director:                      Mark Romanek

Starring:                        Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Charlotte Rampling and Sally Hawkins

Nominations and Awards

• Won Best Actress Award (Carey Mulligan) at the British Independent Film Awards
• Won Best Actor Award (Andrew Garfield) at the Evening Standard British Film Awards
• A further three wins and 20 nominations.

“This is a good movie, from a masterful novel...  What is happening is implied not spelled out.  We are required to observe.  Even the events themselves are amenable to different interpretations.  The characters may not know what they are revealing about themselves.  They certainly don’t know the whole truth of their existence.  We do, because we are free human beings.  It is sometimes not easy to extend such stature to those we value because they support our comfort.”

Roger Ebert

Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) are all pupils at a boarding school who become entangled in a love triangle.  As their relationship develops they gradually learn why they are at the school and what their fate will be.   

The film is based on the 2005 novel by Kazou Ishiguro who won the Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day (memorably filmed by James Ivory with brilliant performances by Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins in the lead roles).  The screenplay for Never Let Me Go was written by Alex Garland, a friend of Ishiguro who had purchased the film rights before the novel was published.  Garland is an established novelist in his own right (his novels include The Beach and The Tesseract) as well as a screenwriter whose work includes the scripts for 28 Days Later (2002) and Sunshine (2007) both directed by Danny Boyle, who had previously directed a film based on The Beach (2000).

Carey Mulligan was cast in the key role of Kathy on the advice of one of the producers who had just seen her performance in An Education (2009) and Keira Knightley agreed to join the cast after a request from Carey Mulligan (they had both appeared in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice where Knightley played Elizabeth Bennet and Mulligan, in her first film role, played Kitty Bennet. 

Mark Romanek began his career as a director of music videos where he worked with musicians of the calibre of k d lang, David Bowie, Madonna, Michel Jackson and Johnny Cash.  He made his name with the psychological thriller One Hour Photo (2002) for which he also wrote the screenplay, and Never Let Me Go appeared in many critics’ lists of the best films of 2010. 

Here's the trailer: