Anna Karenina continues to accumulate series. In just two chapters of one hour and forty minutes each, which represent something like a long movie, Leo Tolstoy’s classic Europa is coming to the European screen in a major production. That love story is summed up there, almost a Latin American soap opera but in a palace key, which concentrates in Anna a kind of intimate revolution in the rigid corsets of Russian imperial society, today seen with new interest in light of the transformations of the feminist struggle of recent times.
“Anna, do you want me to leave the State job for your brother’s whims?” her husband says at the beginning of the first chapter, rejecting a trip proposed by her. The chapter ends on the opposite pole, with Anna running away from home with her lover: “I hate you, I will go with him, you can do whatever you want. You have repressed me for eight years. You never saw me as a woman with a life. You never saw me as a woman who needs love. I forced myself to love you, and I put all my love into my son when I might no longer love you. I can’t fool myself anymore. But it’s not my fault, I’m alive, and I want love!”
Karenin, Anna Karenina’s distant, bureaucratic and detached husband, curtly gives her two options: the first, to go with her lover and never see her son once more. Or to stay at home as if nothing had happened. That is one of the nodal points of the series, which also draws a parallel line in the romance between Princess Kitty and Levin, a somewhat idealistic country owner who learned to listen to the peasants regarding working the land and is adored by them.
Anna breaks up with her partner and embarks on a love affair that goes once morest all norms.
Sober and without leaving aside the melodramatic tone, in the second chapter Anna languishes on the brink of death, following having given birth to a child with her lover, while her husband and lover are waiting. Overcome by guilt, Anna goes through different states, having wished for her death in the face of the conflicts that break out around her and at the same time grateful to have been reborn “unforgivably happy”. In this way she follows the spirit of Tolstoy in the novel, where the story of a woman who abandons her husband and son for a lover and ends up committing suicide, unable to bear the social condemnation. Tolstoy did not criticize Anna but rather deeply respected her “for having been able to follow the course of her passions,” as noted by Eva Halac, an author and theater director who recently staged one of the many versions of the play in the Buenos Aires theater.
Thus Anna breaks up with her partner and embarks on a love affair once morest society, once morest all norms. The 850 pages that Leo Tolstoy wrote between 1873 and 1875 were never an impediment to the tragic story of love and death being condensed into the most diverse cinematic versions, which began already in the silent period, when Greta Garbo starred in the melodrama Love (1927). “Anna Karenina has everything it takes to be adapted: imperial exteriors, sumptuous and whispering interiors, gallantry, dancing, infidelity, pregnancy, tragedy and a heroine torn by passion and its consequences. There are many who have recognised its melodramatic power: it has been adapted more than 20 times between film and television,” the writer summarised. Maria Gainza.
New version
In this new version of Europa Europa, everything focuses on how, in the elite of 19th century Russian high society, the young aristocrat Anna Karenina has a chance encounter with Alexei Vronsky, a brilliant career officer and the man whom all the single women in Moscow want to marry.
From there, the plot is anchored by Anna and Kitty, the two women who discuss their stories made up of illusions, disappointments and internal clashes between mandates, love, lineages, politics, disillusionment and the sombre mirror of so-called good manners. Under the direction of Christian Duguay and with the magnetic performances of Vittoria Puccini in the role of Anna Karenina, Lou de Laâge as Kitty and Santiago Cabrera in the character of Count Aleksei Vronsky, the premiere is announced on the Europa Europa screen on Wednesdays 10 and 17 July at 10 pm in Argentina.
The series suggests that Anna, Tolstoy’s ill-fated heroine, resorted to suicide almost as a punishment.
“All happy families resemble each other, just as all unhappy ones have common peculiar features,” is the beginning of Tolstoy’s novel. which runs throughout the series, giving voice-over to different characters. In these changes of point of view – which sometimes unnecessarily distract the focus from Anna – there are dances in Moscow in 1870, among family palaces, carriages, trains, bad omens; a universe of ostentation, jealousy, desires, secrets and half-truths that are whispered in the corridors of high society salons and theatres. The women do not seem to talk regarding anything other than love. Just as in the novel, they talk regarding arranged marriages, the difficult emancipation of women, hypocrisy, divorce, religion. “I am not strange, I am bad,” says Anna, between courtships, with her almost unattainable beauty and rebelling once morest her husband’s sense of possession.
The most attractive aspect of this new version is how the passion between Count Vronsky and Anna is born and develops. However, it concentrates a fateful circle on Anna that is somewhat abrupt and condemnatory, while, on the contrary, it shows a bright side of life in Kitty’s story, supported by the designs of God and good morality. In this feature, which is presented under an intentional solemnity, lies the weak – and ideological – message of the series: it is suggested that Anna, Tolstoy’s ill-fated heroine, committed suicide almost as a punishment. Because of her, because of her conduct that was far from “improving” and because she did not learn in time “the lessons of living”, something that the Apollonian and dignified Kitty did achieve.