Film Review: Doctor Zhivago + BFI Love

'Turbulent were the times and fiery was the love story of Zhivago, his wife, and the passionate, tender Lara.' Thus gushes the original tagline of Doctor Zhivago, David Lean's rambling 1965 epic, which follows the difficult life of poet and physician Yuri Zhivago. Entering and exiting the story at various intervals are his long-suffering wife Tonya and his mistress Lara, who struggles under the desires of Victor Komarovsky, a rich businessman with dubious motives.

Despite a lengthy runtime of 200 minutes, this is but a fraction of the extensive narrative first published in 1957 by Russian novelist Boris Pasternak. The film misses many crucial details of the original novel, bookended by a cliché Hollywood framing device which provides the rather bleak tale with some sense of satisfying closure. Such trims cause the motivations of many of the characters to be difficult to understand. Zhivago's forgiving nature and romantic soul seem constantly at odds with the cold cynical world around him, and his wife seems impossibly accepting that he should suddenly leave her for another woman. Lara's desire for the corpulent Komarovsky is played too safe to be believable. Lean's attention to detail, however, is meticulous, and still stands up after fifty years despite the picture-postcard portrayal of a bloody revolution. Maurice Jarre's 'Lara's Theme' is iconic, if repetitive.

In the end, strangled by Production Code censorship, Lean's film rings emotionally cold compared with the charged remake from 2002. But it is nonetheless a classic, a triumph of colossal set design, daring vision and the clout of the studio budget. Its melancholy comes from the memory of the recently late Omar Sharif, his death echoing the film itself which heralded the end of the age of sweeping epics made to be seen on the big screen. I am glad I got to see it up there when I did, thanks to the BFI's Love season here.

My recently published essay on gender performativity in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' and Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop can be found on page 57 of this journal:

Love is Unlucky... Wider Reading 13: Anna Karenina

All good blogs are alike; every bad blog is bad in its own way, though I hope Tolstoy would have liked this one. Almost every aspect of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s life is incorporated into Anna Karenina; the loss of his mother at a young age, his social awkwardness, antimilitaristic sentiments, his courtship of his wife, contact with peasants, and his overwhelming awareness of the power of death. This novel, his second most famous after War and Peace, is often viewed as the turning point in Tolstoy’s career, the point at which he shifted away from fiction and toward faith. The tug-of-war between these two forces helps create the rich portrait of Anna, whom Tolstoy both disapproves of and loves.

The novel explores the rich tapestry of mankind’s capacity for love, set against the opulent backdrop of the twilight of the Russian Empire. Despite the elegant settings, danger lurks and around every corner is the constant reminder that this powerful, precarious world is soon to drop. An impoverished train worker is killed; a privileged man who has seen the crisis coming leaves his duties to work with the commoners. The novel, however, centres on the lives and loves of families inhabiting the high societies of St Petersburg and Moscow. Anna is the wife of the respected but dull Minister Karenin. What love she lacks in her marriage she lavishes on her only son, Seryozha, and later her affair with handsome cavalry officer Count Vronsky. Meanwhile Anna’s brother, Oblonsky, is experiencing marriage troubles of his own. Dissatisfied with his wife’s fading attractiveness, he has been caught with the governess and must repent his infidelity. His wife’s young sister Kitty, at the same time, has her heart broken by Vronsky as he chooses Anna over her, but finds happiness in her friend and suitor, Levin.

In his depiction of Anna’s appearance at the train station during her first meeting with Vronsky, Tolstoy emphasizes Anna’s spiritual rather than physical attributes. This method of characterizing her is important, for it reinforces from the very beginning that although Tolstoy may harshly condemn adultery on an abstract level, he does not portray Anna as a passion-crazed vixen—as popular novels of the time often represented the straying wife. The parallel structure of Anna’s and Levin’s story lines was one of Tolstoy’s strokes of genius in composing Anna Karenina. Their stories begin on very different notes: Anna finds love with Vronsky just at the moment when Levin loses love with Kitty. Anna’s decision to act on her feelings brings her thrills and excitement, whereas Levin’s decision brings him dejection and depression. Both Anna and Levin seek truth in their personal relationships, unwilling to settle for anything less. Anna discovers that she would prefer to suffer with her true love rather than continue to lead a life of lies and deceit with a man she does not love. Her = unconventional actions are prompted by a desire not for rebellion for its own sake but for absolute sincerity in her emotional life. Similarly, Levin, after Kitty’s rebuff, does not go after the next girl on his list but resigns himself to eternal bachelorhood and withdraws to the country. Like Anna, Levin wants all or nothing in love.

Anna Karenina - Quotations

Love is Russian... Wider Reading 10: Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago is an epic, a romance, and a history. In the course of Yuri’s life, the modern history of Russia is revealed. He is born under czarist rule but lives through World War I, the Revolution, and the Civil War. He begins life as the member of a wealthy family, but is reduced to poverty by his father’s alcoholism. He remains a member of the intelligentsia, and he focuses his attention on questions of philosophy and religion. The revolution changes the face of Russian society, and he finds that his family history and his status as a doctor make him suspicious to the people who come to power. Yuri seems destined for a tragic end, and, ultimately, his life is characterized by brief moments of happiness surrounded by periods of darkness. He finds all of his convictions challenged, and is torn from all of the people he loves. After his death, Yuri leaves behind children born to three different women, all destined for different fates: exile is possible, poverty is probable, but uncertainty is certain.

Boris Pasternak’s epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath was not permitted publication in the Soviet Union until 1987. One of the results of its release in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it, or risk leaving his beloved Russia forever. The book quickly became an international best-seller. Doctor Yuri Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poetry he composes constitutes some of the most beautiful writing in the novel.

The first image of the novel - Yura crying over his mother's grave--creates a sense of morbid expectation. The further knowledge of his father's lost fortune, revealed by the scene in the train, adds suspense. This is compounded by several shifts in time and location that occur. Pasternak draws the story line of Misha into the novel by describing his boredom and irritability, together with his dissatisfaction at being Jewish. When the man who kills himself is revealed to be Zhivago, the realization is both a means of integrating the different story lines and establishing the time flow of the novel. It is clear that Zhivago had a story to tell and that it was closely linked to the lives of Yura and his mother, though he has not seen them for some time. Early on, Pasternak establishes a sense of things unravelling backward through time, by revealing details about the past as the action of the novel marches forward.

Doctor Zhivago - Quotations

Love is Enduring... Wider Reading 9: Birdsong

Birdsong is the story of Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman who arrives in Amiens, France in 1910. After a passionate love affair with his married landlady that goes terribly wrong, he leaves only to return four years later to fight in the Great War. Over the course of the novel he suffers a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself. Entwined with his story are numerous heartrending tales of others affected by the fever sweeping Europe: from Michael Weir, his best friend, Jack Firebrace, whose tender heart becomes his undoing, Jeanne, a woman of endless kindness and patience, to the 1970s and the story of Elizabeth, who discovers her grandfather's tale through his letters, diaries, and the stories of those who were close to him. Set before and during World War One, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale.

The novel defies modern convention by exclusively employing the omniscient narrator to tell its harrowing story. Penetrating into the deepest thoughts, pasts and even, in some cases, futures of every single character, it seems unnervingly invasive, but becomes an all-encompassing narratorial rubric to complement perfectly the difficult subject matter. Birdong is indeed difficult; it is a World War One novel with an explicit focus on trench warfare - that most horrifying and unimaginable of all wartime terrors. While the public consciousness may have a vague notion of the sheer horror, a true understanding remains forever ungraspable to the individual.

Birdsong has a tripartite plot structure, beginning with a long pre-war love story. Faulks’ intentions in doing this are obvious and multiple: put simply, this section serves to humanize the characters we are soon to see committing horrific acts of brutal killing and to drive home to the reader what’s at stake. There’s also more than a little dramatic irony. The reader knows what is coming, and is powerless to warn the characters. Stylistically this is also the most colourful part of the book. The writing here is metaphor-heavy, plentiful with adjectives and parenthetic digressions. The second section offers the ‘meat’ of the novel. A jump-cut to mid-war trench life carries with it a drastic change in Faulks’ linguistic register. The synaesthesia of sex is replaced with that of war: now there’s blood, iron, mud and agony. There’re no more metaphors, few adjectives, many more concrete nouns and a focus on active verbs. The contrast with the first part of the book is abrasive and sudden – here there is no artificiality of language. The third and weakest part of the novel is another jump-cut, but this time to a modern-day setting. The characters and events that occupy this part of the novel seem extremely dull and muted, creating a sharp contrast to the horror, and excitement and bravery, of war.

Birdsong - Quotations

Love is a Journey... Wider Reading 6: Song of Achilles

Greece - in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something deeper - despite the displeasure of Achilles's mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess. But when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, Achilles must go to war in distant Troy and fulfil his destiny. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus goes with him, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear.

Despite its fame, the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is one that has puzzled scholars and readers for hundreds of years. It is hard to make a character like Achilles, who drags his enemy's body around the beseiged Troy several times a day sympathetic - especially to modern eyes. This is the writers challenge in this novel, and for the most part she succeeds convincingly by taking his story back to its roots, and imagining the development of Achilles' relationship with his beloved Patroclus. Using the latter's gentle narrative voice, Miller deftly paints the picture of a boy, and later a man, in love, and the way in which he is stunned and grateful for that love being returned.

Although not explicitly stated in Homer's epic "The Iliad," some accounts have placed the two men, always depicted at least as close friends, in a homosexual relationship and it is on this that the novel rests. Its strengths lie not so much in evoking the passionate love story, although the writer does so elegantly, but in creating an almost distressingly real setting in the 'age of Heroes' - despite the matter-of-fact intervention of gods and the lauding of values that seem alien to modern eyes. The argument between Achilles and Agamemnon evolves from a petty spat between raging warlords into an inevitable clash of personalities driven by prophecy, love and loss.

Love is Forbidden... Wider Reading 2: Lolita

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style" opines Humbert Humbert, erstwhile college professor, aesthete and tortured romantic. Establishing him as one of the greatest writers in the English language, Lolita is Vladimir Nabokov's impossibly funny and rapturously beautiful story of Humbert's total, catastrophic obsession with twelve-year-old Lolita Haze. At once prim and predatory, Humbert will stop at nothing in his frenzy to possess his "nymphet," first marrying her mother and then embarking with Lolita on a journey across the American landscape, through roadside diners and five-dollar-a-night motels. A once sublime and awful, cruel and irresistible, Lolita is a triumphant masterpiece of twentieth century literature.

"Lolita" has often been described as "the only convincing love story of the twentieth century." Although the novel was banned on publication on the grounds that it was pornographic, Lolita is most definitely a story about love, not lust. Indeed, many types of love are explored within the novel, and all are experienced by one man. While Humbert's love for Lolita borders on the obsessive, it is also unrequited, despite the duo's spending upwards of three years together. The emphasis on "forbidden" love is questionable, however, as the taboo element of the novel changes with the time in which it is read.

As I mentioned before, most contemporary readers dismissed the novel as too explicit and shocking, with a level of public outrage not seen since "Lady Chatterley's Lover." However, to the modern twenty-first century reader, the actual words and scenes within the novel itself are fairly harmless, compared with the level of candidness now popular in fiction. The subject matter, however, remains just as shocking in its dealing with underage sex and paedophilia, though this is up to the opinions of the reader.

I personally find the novel both appalling and enlightening, and it is one of my favourite books. The sophisticated language used by Nabokov is untouchable, and exactly mirrors the conflict of the protagonist.

Lolita - Quotations