tapilin

The movie wouldn't deserve any attention if it didn't cost more than a billion, whereas it looks like a cheap B film. Where is all the money they spent? We only see cheap costumes - even on the lead characters (the costumes are available in the internet, so the prices are known!), we are listening a cheap and strange, to say the least, story. The quick-and-dirty set and architecture cannot cost that much.

Besides, there is nothing "patriotic" in it; the movie looks like an insult and parody on the actual tragic history of Mongol invasion, insult for both descendants of the Mongols and Russians.

Sad, but true.

It happened that the first movie I have ever seen in a movie theater is this particular film. It was in 1984; I was seven years old, and my elementary school took us to watch it. I liked it so much. Now, I'm trying to watch this film 41 years later, but it is barely possible.

The movie's best parts are its grotesque moments, especially Cherkasov's performance; they also changed the plot, adding the struggle for Irish independence, which is quite interesting. But almost everything else is well below the average, to be honest. I love Soviet 1930s cinema, and I admire Cherkasov, but compare this movie to "The Return of Maxim" of the same 1937, or "Baltic Deputy" from 1936, for example; the difference is dramatic.

According to the director, Sarik Andreasyan, Pushkin's language is "unmanageable for the modern ear." I think this is the key to understanding why the movie is so excruciatingly boring and... strange, to put it mildly. No, it is evident, that Pushkin can only seem "unmanageable" to a D student who later became a mediocre director (with a specific talent for scooping up government money, however ) and who still harbors a grievance against the author he was forced to study in school. Pushkin's language remains surprisingly modern, being ultimately succinct and vivid (considering Russians' millennial obsession with their "koroche," or condensed speech).

Dictum-factum, Sarik eliminated most of the poetry (although Vdovichenko reads some verses in a strange jack-in-the-box style), but he did not substitute it with action, emotion, character evolution, or revolutions-elements we love and expect from a good movie. Instead, he relentlessly (and very slowly) drags you through the distorted and suffocated story (by the way, Zaretsky is not an evil trickster here; it's all Onegin's fault), occasionally freezing the action.

The first time, I could not finish watching this pretentious and tedious mockery - not even of the novel, which the author didn't bother to read, but of the 1999 adaptation. I still managed to force myself to watch the rest of the movie (for the sake of Pushkin's legacy, as we are unlikely to see a new adaptation in the next 25 years), often taking tea breaks, which is the only way to endure this torture.

In conclusion, don't waste your precious life on this dead thing; "Onegin" (1999) shines like unattainable jewels in retrospect.