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Anna Karenina is acclaimed director Joe Wright’s bold, theatrical new vision of the epic story of love, stirringly adapted from Leo Tolstoy’s great novel by Academy Award winner Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love).The film marks the third collaboration of the director with Academy Award-nominated actress Keira Knightley and Academy Award-nominated producers Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, and Paul. Anna Karenina has a cold marriage with her husband, Count Alexei Karenin, and they have a son. Anna meets the cavalry officer Count Vronsky at the train station and they feel attracted by each other. Soon she learns that Vronsky will propose to Kitty, who is the younger sister of her sister-in-law Dolly.
Parents need to know that Anna Karenina is a sensuous, visually sumptuous, beautifully stylized take on Tolstoy's classic novel about doomed love in late 1870s Russia. It's quite intense, focusing on how a woman (played by ) turns her back on her husband to be with her lover, putting her marriage, motherhood, and place in society in jeopardy and tearing her apart. There's little nudity beyond cleavage and men's bare chests, but some scenes definitely imply lovemaking, and there's moaning and passionate kissing. Also expect smoking and vodka drinking, as well as some tragic scenes and death. ANNA KARENINA takes us back to the late 1800s, when the members of Russian high society conducted their lives as if onstage, with one another as their audience. No wonder, then, that when Anna , the wife of studious politician Karenin , goes off-script by falling in love with a young soldier, Vronsky , the play, if you will, grinds to a halt.
Society shuns Anna as she falls deeply in love with Vronsky, who risks his own professional advancement to stay close to her. Anna, on the other hand, has more on the line; she could lose her son and social standing forever. Is Anna's and Vronsky's love worth the sacrifice, and can it withstand all this scrutiny? During the end credits, director Joe Wright's is said to be 'inspired by' the classic Leo Tolstoy novel of the same name; 'inspired' is a fitting word to use. This isn't your usual costume drama with realistic backdrops and true-to-historical-detail scenery. Instead, while it is set during the late 1870s, it unfolds mostly in a theater, with the main events taking place onstage, under a proscenium arch.
The unspoken, the underbelly, the illicit takes place above it, on the crossover and flyspace. The audience in the movie is Russian society, observing the drama as it happens.It's all brilliant, even if it takes a while to get your bearings. Traditionalists may flinch at this interpretation, which distils Tolstoy's dense novel to its essence, focusing on Anna and Levin's quest for love - two sides of the same coin. Knightley exhibits a whole host of transformations on her face; though she relies a bit too much on some obvious reactions to transmit emotions, she's an empathetic Anna, willing us to understand why she has done all she has done, in the name of love. Taylor-Johnson is a sensual Vronsky; Anna's attraction to him is understandable, if a folly. And Law is magnificent in the economy and power of his portrayal of the cuckolded Karenin. This adaptation, written by playwright Tom Stoppard, is brave and sometimes claustrophobic but for the most part a success, even if you do wonder about the possibilities that could have been explored had Wright taken a more conventional route.
Anna, the other part of Tolstoy's dual scheme, symbolizes the effects of an urban environment on Tolstoy's 'natural man.' Like Levin, Anna seeks a personal resolution between spontaneous, unreflecting life and the claims of reason and moral law. Being a woman, however, whose human destiny is to raise children and be mistress of her household, Anna is more victimized by culture and society than her male counterpart and is more sensitive to the social restrictions on her quest for personal meaning.
Because she is claimed primarily by her position in an advanced — therefore corrupt — society, Anna is doomed at the outset.Responding only to her inner emotions, she is the most natural character of all the urban noblemen in the novel. The strength of her inner nature enables Anna to cast off from conventional society and seek love as her basic definition.Tolstoy makes it obvious that Anna's marriage will never satisfy her passionate nature.
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Karenin, an outstanding example of an individual dehumanized by sophisticated, rational society, is the first one Anna must reject. She must seek the love of a freer, yet honorable, individual. Presenting her with a military man for a lover, Tolstoy develops Anna's tragedy with a cruel logical consistency.Vronsky's brilliant promise in his career implies he has honor, daring, and a sense of life and death any good soldier requires. Opposed to these good qualities is his limited imagination, the military virtues of sacrificing individuality for a sense of corpsmanship, a frivolous attitude toward women, and his rigid code of behavior according to his military standards of 'honor' and 'prestige.' We see the same values that attract Anna to Vronsky provide limitations which doom their liaison to failure.
Tolstoy seems to say that Anna's search for love is hopeless: Neither Karenin nor Vronsky have the inner power to respond to her emotional intensity. Had Anna fallen in love with Levin, a possibility Tolstoy presents in Part 7, she would have affirmed her love commitment through her children and husband in Levin's country environment.The specific machinery of Anna's downfall derives from Tolstoy's basic moral philosophy: Unselfish seeking of goodness obtains a state of grace, whereas a predatory self-assertion results in damnation.
We see how Anna becomes cruel, vindictive, and self-destroying as she exists according to her single goal — to maintain her love relationship. This becomes harder to maintain as Anna loses, one by one, the outside values of the social order which structure not only her existence, but Vronsky's as well. Shut off from her son, her friends, her protective status, Anna's love provides her with the only source of vitality.
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Under the pressure to live only through her love, she denies her femininity as the vehicle of bearing children; her charms have become the singular weapon of the witch. Thus we see why Vronsky shrinks from her heightened beauty: It is to her witchlike metamorphosis that Vronsky responds so coldly, driving Anna, in her turn, to a state of jealous desperation which further repels him.Tolstoy shows how Anna, seeking self-gratification in love, drives herself from salvation, away from God, toward satanism and self-destruction. Unlike Levin who had discovered love of God, Anna's search concludes at the dead end of hate, and death is her only recourse.
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