This review will not be original, because this film does not deserve originality (some colleagues practice poetry on the topic – not “in the Onegin stanza”, but excessive generosity in any case). The main problem with “Onegin” emerged in the fall, when the cast of the film was announced by Sarik Andreasyan, a director who does not follow the most honest rules. In principle the current text could have been written at that moment, but for professional reasons I had to wait until March to routinely confirm all suspicions. They were approved.
Every frame of Onegin testifies to a fundamental misunderstanding of Alexander Pushkin’s text – not even the depths dug by researchers such as Yuri Lotman, but the banal integrity of the meanings of all written words. Although the action of the novel takes place over several years, Onegin is not even 30 years old at the time of the finale, so everything that happens makes sense in the context of his age – that is, he was not a bastard in his youth. Actor Viktor Dobronravov will turn 41 the day after the release of Onegin, and in his performance the hero looks like a natural sociopath who will start talking about Phil Collins and the Genesis group, and then reach for the axe. Vakhtangov star Dobronravov played Onegin in a production of Rimas Tuminas 11 years ago (he has now been fired and cancelled) – and even then he was on the brink. Elizaveta Moryak, who plays Tatyana Larina, also does not look like a girl of 17-18 years old, but she successfully hides in Dobronravov’s gray curls.
The psychedelia here is further deepened by the fact that the rest of the film follows Pushkin’s letter with the annoying meticulousness of a perfect student who has memorized a textbook (sometimes Vladimir Vdovichenkov comes into the frame and reads it as Alexander Sergeevich in the text). passages from the novel) including descriptions of the youth of the heroes. The director himself calls “It is a principled decision” and “the previous 25 years are today’s 40 years,” he says.
Since we are talking about a kind of auteur cinema, we can cautiously assume that 39-year-old Andreasyan is involved in this story under the guise of Dobronravov-Onegin. Moreover, cinematographer Kirill Zotkin’s camera occasionally tries to caress the Sailor, who is married to the director (but then the jokes about deers, antlers and their instructions, voiced with great pleasure off the screen, begin to seem strange). Onegin in the form of fan fiction, shot as a gift to his wife, has a right to exist. The problem is that they will still show it to us, and it is not entirely clear (or rather, it is obvious, of course) what sins there are.
Here I would advise those interested to turn to the work of Mike Flanagan (who, by the way, takes pictures of his wife everywhere with just flair) for a masterclass in transferring someone else’s text to the screen. But the point is not that the Andreasyan brothers watched too few good films and TV series, but that they cannot reproduce them. The Great Gatsby is actively quoted in Onegin (look for DiCaprio!) – or rather, everyone here is trying to fail to steal The dazzling brilliance of Baz Luhrmann’s tape. As a result, love letters are written and distributed between two neighboring properties as if it were the movie “1917” (Andreasyan uses the term “emotional action”).
Of course, there’s nothing to praise here: we’ll at least point out the fact that they don’t cowardly drown foreign speech with overlaid voiceovers, but instead run subtitles, and we’ll remove it immediately. the fact that the subtitles were written incorrectly (sorry, Monsieur Andreasyan). We should probably thank fate that Onegin runs for two and a half hours, not seven. Although by its nature it was actually a serial: Pushkin himself called the novel “a collection of mixed episodes”, absolutely independent (any of them could be the last), and “Eugene Onegin” was published for several years, each in separate issues. this became a high-profile incident.
In the case of bad movie adaptations, it’s common to be upset that they won’t be making another one anytime soon. The new “Onegin” is such an empty picture that it will undoubtedly disappear from public consciousness in a few months. This is the paradox. And here’s another one: Sarik Andreasyan, in a sense, is really a figure quite suitable for the film adaptation of “Eugene Onegin” – he filmed and filmed, but it was all to no avail, on the contrary, there was such an “extra person”. confused in vain. But that’s OK: His name won’t be written on the debris. This will be our reward.
Release date in Russia: March 7, 2024
Duration: 141 minutes
Manager: Sarik Andreasyan
Casting: Victor Dobronravov, Denis Prytkov, Lisa Moryak, Tanya Sabinova, Alena Khmelnitskaya, Vladimir Vdovichenkov
Where to see: to the cinema