Anna Karenina

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1781769/

Yikes, it’s been a while: sometimes, life just catches up and there’s no time for thinking about it. Which I supposed (caution: glib segue ahead!) is Anna Karenina’s problem.  I am having mixed feelings about this film overall: mostly, I liked it very much, but it looses its way at the end and (I don’t often say this) probably needed to be about 20 minutes longer. One minute, Anna has left her husband and is living with Vronsky; there is some vague mention of her wanting a divorce; within about 10 minutes, she’s addicted to morphine, become a raving paranoiac and suddenly throws herself under a train for no clear reason. And poor old Vronsky is a bit of an empty space: he’s very pretty but one doesn’t have a clue if there is anything going on between his ears, nor what he actually feels for Anna – his love for her is oddly unconvincing. So, sorry Mr Stoppard, but somewhere between what you wrote and whatever happened to your script in the edit, characters got a little thin and plot got a little rushed.

But the thing you cannot get away from is the beauty of the production. The majority of the action is filmed in a 19^th century theatre, which they constantly redress to provide us with various people’s homes, workplaces, ballrooms, streets, railway stations, tea rooms, ice rink, even a race-course at one point. Oh, and every now and then it gets to be a theatre. It’s very Brechtian, especially at the start, the stage machinery quite literally revealed, with the result that we are very aware that we are watching a narrative, a story told by actors, the self-conscious artifice of it keeping us at an emotional distance – it’s a game, a process, a story with a very visible frame (sometimes, literally, the proscenium arch of the theatre). And the music works as part of this as well. There are two basic types of music in the film: dance music, which draws attention to itself, and more conventional underscore, although the two cross over in significant places. The dance music predominates at the start – it’s quirky, hints of the Shostakovich jazz suites, self-consciously stylized in the same way that the action is at the start. As one scene ends, we make a transition from this, set in Anna’s brother’s offices, to him and his friend Konstantin going to dinner in a restaurant. The office workers strip off the top players of their clothing, and are transformed into waiters; the actors move scenery and props out of the way and bring in screens to create the restaurant; the camera, in a long tracking shot, follows all this as we move from one side of the theatre space to another (or do we just go around in a circle?) and as the camera tracks, so various musicians – a clarinettist, a tuba player, a singer, pass in and out of view, making clear that the music we are hearing is not simply underscore but is also within the scene as well. It is overtly theatrical: I spent the first 15 minutes of the film wondering why they’d bothered to make a film at all, rather than doing this on stage. The music by Joe Wright’s usual composer, Dario Marianelli) has a very Brechtian role in defining and drawing attention to the narrative space: later, after Konstantin has made his failed proposal to Princess Kitty (yes, that really is what she is called), he leaves her salon, where a ball is beginning, and climbs up onto the gantries above the stage: this is the ‘street’, outside the salon which occupies the stage. The music follows him: in the salon, the violin melody was that of a somewhat vibrato-heavy waltz; as he climbs to the catwalks, populated by the common people, it is transformed into something folkish, Klezmerish. From the catwalk, he looks back down into the salon, and as the camera follows his gaze, the violin seamlessly moves back to the elegant waltz.

And then the music stops for a while, and we have a series of scenes, in which we first meet Anna, where there is a great deal of conversation and musical silence, as if to try and say “OK, we have established that, for budgetary reasons, we are shooting this whole damn thing in a theatre rather than on location, and it’s all very arch and camp, sorry about that, but we had to make the theatre thing work somehow; but now we want to get on with the real story and get you emotionally engaged with it so no more music, let’s have some proper acting”. And I am in two minds whether it really works: the Brechtian distancing that arises from spending a lot of our time visibly in a theatre makes it a little difficult to really engage with the story, to start seeing the characters rather than the actors. It is apparent that we ‘see’ the theatre and its machinery much less clearly in the scenes involving Anna, Karenin and Vronsky on their own – there is a definite attempt to avoid distracting (alienating) us with the frame when we are with these characters.

Musically, the central theme is the waltz heard at the fateful ball where Vronsky dances with Anna and throws over Kitty. Here, obviously, the music is diegetic – everyone is dancing to it so obviously they can hear it, although there is no visible sign of the orchestra. But here again, they play a lot of games with theatrical artifice: when Vronksy persuades Anna to dance with him, all the other dancers freeze as they take to the floor, and only come back to life as the couple pass them; and the dancing itself is gorgeous and bizarre, made up of languidly nonsensical hand and arm gestures more than anything else, as if the dancers are becoming physically entwined, tied in knots that they weave and then extricate themselves from – it is graceful yet suggests an underlying anxiety, a highly stylized, abstracted set of gestures that might have started out as some kind of fight.  The waltz theme then becomes the love theme for Anna and Vronsky, sliding from ‘real’ diegetic music at the ball into the nondiegetic undescore; and seems to suggest that their tale is, like the choreography, a convoluted, anxious, elegant but unsettled dance that we know will not have a happy ending.

The only happy ending is the one for Kitty and Konstantin, who do finally get married and go to live in the countryside. They are also the only ones who ever seem to escape the theatre into the real world: Konstantin at one point literally walks out of the theatre onto a snow covered landscape, and pretty much all the location work concerns him  - he has an actual house (rather than a home created out of a corner of the theatre); and he and Kitty also have proper non-diegetic underscore, as if they are the only conventionally 'real' people in the whole film - they do not want to be part of the performance, but to get on with life away from the labyrinthine workings of the theatre that Anna singularly fails to escape.