The detractors ridiculed the film’s overblown sets, the accented voices of foreign actors singing in Russian and Knightley’s allegedly contorted facial expressions. Trud newspaper said “the English Anna Karenina is too bony” – a view apparently shared by many cinemagoers – while admitting the costume drama, which premiered in Moscow earlier this month, was “bright” and “convincing”. Others were less charitable. Lidiya Maslova, a critic for the respected Kommersant newspaper, said Knightley’s expressions were “over-energetic” and her portrayal made Karenina “too sure of herself”. “She angrily flashes her eyes, flares her nostrils and, before a kiss, sticks out her unique jaw as if she is about to bite off Vronsky’s tongue,” the critic wrote, adding that Knightley’s hair looked like a “Medusa’s head of snakes”. Critics in Moscow have traditionally looked scornfully on Western attempts to screen Russian classics. David Lean’s 1965 version of Doctor Zhivago with Omar Sharif as the protagonist was ridiculed when it was first shown in Russia in the 1990s. In the new film, British director Joe Wright sets the story in a theatre, a device that British and American critics have praised as a fresh means for exploring the novel’s themes of pain, fidelity and love. Some Russian commentators agreed, saying the drama – scripted by Tom Stoppard and also starring Jude Law as Karenina’s cuckolded husband – was innovative and should not be compared with the sweeping original book. But Dmitry Bykov, a popular poet and political opposition figure, said Wright had been “condescending, scornful and egocentric” in using one of Russia’s greatest classics for an “experiment in theatricality” while “spitting on its hidden meanings”. In a tongue-in-cheek reference to the recent US ban on alleged Russian human rights abusers visiting America, Mr Bykov said one potential response to the British film was “to introduce a parliamentary embargo on all Keira Knightley’s future works”. Another was to produce an insulting Russian film adaptation of “a sacral English classic” such as Robinson Crusoe. “Wright’s film can be bought and shown in Russia only in a state of total moral insanity,” the poet concluded testily. Wright and Knightley have not responded to the Russian criticism.
