Chill on the Russian Front
FILM: Onegin
DIRECTOR: Martha Fiennes
STARRING: Ralph Fiennes, Liv Tyler
GRADE: C+
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RECORD STORY OWNER ROB GORDON (JOHN CUSACK) IS MORE COMFORTABLE WITH HIS VINYL THAN HIS MANY RELATIONSHIPS IN HIGH FIDELITY.
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It's hard to say what drew the talented Fiennes family to the downbeat material
in Alexander Pushkin's verse novel Evgeny Onegin, but they
haven't done much with it. Directed by Martha Fiennes and starring her brother
Ralph, the film version, Onegin, is a dreary affair from start to
finish. The title character is a bored 1820s Russian nobleman whose dour
personality is known to darken even the longest winter night in St. Petersburg.
Having wasted all his money, Evgeny (Ralph Fiennes) is happy (if you can call a
single dead-eyed smile happy) to learn that he's inherited a large country
estate from a wealthy uncle. So he's off to the Russian boonies with a chip on
his shoulder, tilting his nose in the air. There he finds a coterie of country
folk who dress the same and act the same as folks in St. Petersburg, but as
they do so, they routinely apologize to Evgeny for their not actually being in
St. Petersburg. He and they both seem to take these apologies as Evgeny's
appropriate due.
Among the people Evgeny meets out in the gentrified sticks is
Vladimir Lensky (Toby Stevens), whom he likes without ever being nice to;
Vlad's lively fiancee, Olga Larina (Lena Headey), with whom Evgeny flirts just
to be mean; and Olga's reserved but beautiful sister Tatyana (Liv Tyler), whom
Evgeny studiously ignores because he's a blithering idiot. Tatyana does not
repay him snub for snub. No, for reasons as mysterious as those accounting for
the fact that Sandra Bernhardt is a celebrity, Tatyana finds Evgeny's hooded
eyes, pallid face, turned-down lips and humped shoulders so entrancingly
attractive that she writes him a passionate letter declaring her love. Evgeny
responds with something approximating a polite yawn.
Sorry, that was me yawning. The overriding question here is, who
cares? Liv Tyler is beautiful, but writers Michael Ignatieff and Peter Ettedgui
haven't given her a character to play. Her Tatyana is almost as stone-faced as
Evgeny. She's not witty or alluring in any way, save her physical beauty. We're
almost shocked when we learn that she has the will to declare herself so
brazenly. The most dramatic thing she does is to sit on the floor and smear her
hands with ink while writing her love letter. In their mutual languor, our
"hero" and "heroine" perhaps deserve each other, but getting involved in their
out-of-synch romance would require as much effort as genuinely hoping that Tom
Arnold and Roseanne might ultimately work things out after all.
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