Fiennes siblings' `Onegin' seduces through the senses

Movie review

XXX "Onegin," with Ralph Fiennes, Liv Tyler, Martin Donovan. Directed by Martha Fiennes. Adapted from the Alexander Pushkin poem by Michael Ignatieff and Peter Ettedgui. 106 minutes. Broadway Market Cinemas. Unrated.

There are many ways to tell an old story. And the sumptuous, largely visual gambit employed by director Martha Fiennes in "Onegin" is sharply dividing critics on both sides of the Atlantic - even as Ralph Fiennes' lead performance in his sister's debut feature elicits general praise.

That a modern-day filmmaker should even attempt to vault Alexander Pushkin's totemic 1831 poem "Evgeny Onegin" to the screen is blasphemous to some.

Their reasoning: Pushkin's Byronic fable about a dissolute Russian noble who fails miserably at both love and friendship is too operatic for celluloid. And since we already have Tchaikovsky's well-known opera, "Evgeny Onegin," why not leave well enough alone?

But I'm in the smaller camp that finds Fiennes' film valid in its own right, as an absorbing immersion into the subtle emotional textures and undercurrents of Pushkin's "verse novel."

With painterly, intimate camera work, vivid locales (in Russia and England), beguiling music (by another brother, Magus Fiennes), and elegant period costuming, Fiennes translates"Onegin" into a swirling, low-grade fever dream of romantic dissolution, yearning, grief and remorse - an excursion for the eyes and subconscious rather than the intellect.

OK, so the film doesn't show you why Pushkin's evocation of the emotional bankruptcy of St. Petersburg aristocracy was such a potent influence on such subsequent Russian scribes as Turgenev and Tolstoy.

But approach it through your senses, rather than your cerebrum, and "Onegin" can seduce you.

Key to Fiennes' vision is her sibling Ralph Fiennes, who isn't stretching much to play yet another fire-and-ice brooder with flaring nostrils and exquisite torments.

In fact, this charismatic and intelligent actor is perfectly suited for Onegin, a city dandy whose move to an inherited rural estate results in tragedy. Fiennes captures in every flicker of expression the count's narcissistic decadence and self-loathing, and later his inevitable isolation and anguish.

Excellent too is Toby Stephens (gifted son of Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith) as the more wholesome Lensky, a poet who befriends Onegin - disastrously.

Lena Headey as Lensky's vivacious fiancee Olga, and Harriet Walter as Olga's watchful mother are also familiar, welcome members of this ensemble.

More problematic is American actress Liv Tyler as Olga's bookish and (implausibly) older sister Tatyana.

Though the camera irradiates Tyler's ripe, heavy-lipped beauty, she's much too limited an actor for this assignment.

Tatyana is the moral compass of the tale. But whether she's supposed to be seething with unrequited passion for the remote Onegin, or selflessly rejecting his love when it's offered years too late, Tyler has a formless, vacuous quality that doesn't meet Pushkin's brave, determined and honorable Tatyana halfway.

Tyler's wispy performance is more a void than a handicap. She can't match the fine-tuned nuancing of costars Ralph Fiennes and Stephens, or the low-key grace of fellow American Martin Donovan. But at least she knows to lie back, rather than try too hard.

Yet believe it or not, even without the right Tatyana, "Onegin" is worth a look, as a molten introduction to Pushkin (read far more in Europe than America), and to the still-developing but intriguing talent of that other Fiennes, Martha.