Two Women (U.)
Directed by Vera Glagoleva.
Starring Anna Vartanyan, Ralph Fiennes, Sylvie Testud, Aleksandr Baluev, Larisa Malevannaya and Bernd Moss. In Russian with subtitles. 104 mins
The opening credits inform us that this is an adaptation of Turgenev's play A Month In The Country: the opening ten minutes tell us that the film intends to make us feel every second of it. Oh turgid, turgid, Turgenev. I suppose Asterix never made it to Russia in his adventures but surely if he had he would have encountered a Turgenev, the cliched doom laden Russian, running a special Russian inversion of a bordello where gentlemen would go to have starch put into their collars by distraught ladies who would then go running around in the corn fields wailing.
If you're filming a classic stage play the western tradition is to do anything in your purview to disguise and conceal its origins – contemporary performances of Shakespeare can do whatever they want with the play, as long as they don't locate it in the time and place in which it is set. This though comes to us from The Ministry of Culture for the Russian Federation, and nobody's messing with anything. You can imagine the commissars stalking the set, making sure everything is just so.
Is it possible for subtitles to be stilted? Certainly when the lead performer Vartanyan is delivering her lines as Natalya Petrovna Islaeva – everybody is always referred to by their full names -they seem so. There is no life in this dialogue, only delivery. Looking round for a friendly face you get Fiennes who is performing in Russian (dubbing himself) and he smiles wanly throughout. Now this may be a splendid mounting of a classic play but as a film it feels like a waste of a long read.
Two Women (U.)
Directed by Vera Glagoleva.
Starring Anna Vartanyan, Ralph Fiennes, Sylvie Testud, Aleksandr Baluev, Larisa Malevannaya and Bernd Moss. In Russian with subtitles. 104 mins
The opening credits inform us that this is an adaptation of Turgenev's play A Month In The Country: the opening ten minutes tell us that the film intends to make us feel every second of it. Oh turgid, turgid, Turgenev. I suppose Asterix never made it to Russia in his adventures but surely if he had he would have encountered a Turgenev, the cliched doom laden Russian, running a special Russian inversion of a bordello where gentlemen would go to have starch put into their collars by distraught ladies who would then go running around in the corn fields wailing.
If you're filming a classic stage play the western tradition is to do anything in your purview to disguise and conceal its origins – contemporary performances of Shakespeare can do whatever they want with the play, as long as they don't locate it in the time and place in which it is set. This though comes to us from The Ministry of Culture for the Russian Federation, and nobody's messing with anything. You can imagine the commissars stalking the set, making sure everything is just so.
Is it possible for subtitles to be stilted? Certainly when the lead performer Vartanyan is delivering her lines as Natalya Petrovna Islaeva – everybody is always referred to by their full names -they seem so. There is no life in this dialogue, only delivery. Looking round for a friendly face you get Fiennes who is performing in Russian (dubbing himself) and he smiles wanly throughout. Now this may be a splendid mounting of a classic play but as a film it feels like a waste of a long read.
