Sympatico TIFF Onegin Piece

September 19, 1999

From the Canadian Press wire service
Author unknown

Ralph Fiennes is the jaded Russian aristocrat who first rebuffs then covets an innocent beauty played by Liv Tyler in Onegin, a lush-looking period epic, the evening gala for which closed the ten-day Toronto International Film Festival Saturday. Partly financed by a subsidiary of CanWest Entertainment, the film is directed by Fiennes' lookalike sister Martha and is based on the classic 19th-century narrative poem Evgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin.

Fiennes told a festival press conference that it had been a project he and his sister wanted to do for years but that financing was difficult to assemble.

"An academic once described Onegin as a love story in which nothing happens twice," he said about the tale of unrequited love set against the backdrop of the privileged social class of St. Petersburg in the 1820s and '30s.

Although the budget was revealed as being in "the low teens," the picture has a distinct Dr. Zhivago look to it, its sweep aided by shooting partially on location in wintertime Petersburg.

For her first feature, Martha Fiennes admitted the box-office appeal of her leading-man brother helped to get the project going. (Another brother, Magnus, did the musical score while Ralph also served as executive producer.)

The whole enterprise was still a risky one.

First, because it is so devoted to the look and feel of Pushkin's sophisticated chamber romance, its melancholy pacing - not unlike a slow Merchant Ivory film - may challenge a moviegoer's attention.

Also because it pairs a skilled actor like Fiennes with Tyler, who lacks the same sort of formal training but who brought just the right element of wide-eyed naivete to the part of Tatyana.

The third risk was in the audacity of foreign filmmakers interpreting a sacred Russian work, something even the Russians have not dared to do.

"They are very nervous about how the west plays their classics, they think they're going to get the Hollywood treatment," Fiennes explained. "After the Bible there's Pushkin."

A Russian-dubbed version was screened in St. Petersburg this summer and Fiennes said most, but not all, of the Russians who saw it liked it, praising it as a very Russian-looking film.

During a visit to his newly-inherited country estate, Onegin spies the beauteous Tatyana, who immediately falls for him and declares her love. He, however, is not interested in entanglements and rejects her, a development that leads to a fatal duel in which Onegin kills his poet friend.

Six years later he and Tatyana meet again in Petersburg where she is now matured and happily married to a prince. Onegin is smitten and tries to reawaken their stillborn romance but to no avail. Tragically, he discovers his human heart too late.

Fiennes also spoke of the inherent irony in the story. In real life, Pushkin the poet, at age 36, died in a duel over a woman's honour, not unlike the way he had written the scene in his work of fiction.

"But I don't think Onegin is Pushkin," the actor said. "Onegin is inspired by a certain kind of literary anti-hero, a disaffected man that Byron was famous for."

Fiennes also denied suggestions that he seems drawn to portraying losers instead of heroes in his films.

"I've chosen parts of conflicted people who go through a sort of rite of passage and either survive it or don't. Those parts interest me because they have more dimension to them. Human fallibility interests me, because I think it's what we all are."