DAVID LEAN'S film Doctor Zhivago, with Carlo Ponti as the producer, is a film one could revisit over and over again. Omar Shariff, Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin.
Beautiful. Slow. My DVD has commentary by Mrs Lean, Shariff and Rod Steiger. Once you've heard this commentary, you'll look at the film differently.
Based on Boris Pasternak's novel, which has a list of characters at the front. Among Yuri's diminutives are Yura and Yurochka.
The novel was published in 1958 (in English); the film was released in 1965. Robert Bolt adapted the novel into a film script.
The novel spans 542 pages with Yuri's poems as an afterword.
Chapter divisions such as The Advent of the Inevitable and Farewell to the Past.
Yuri and Lara Antipova. Love and war. Russia during World War 1 and the Russian Revolution.
The book was banned for years in Russia and the movie was filmed in Spain due to these tensions. Filmed with fake snow and with the train stations in Madrid. The dam scenes were shot at Aldeadávila between Portugal and Spain.
Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for the novel in 1958. However, he had to refuse it. It made him a symbol of rebellion against political injustices in his country, where he was seen as a traitor.
The story is told from the perspective of hindsight. Slowly, as if one were watching an opera with curtains opening and closing; 200 minutes of viewing pleasure.
Lt Gen Yevgraf Zhivago (Alec Guinness) is searching for the daughter of his half-brother Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova. He thinks the dam worker Tanya Komarova may be his niece.
This is the frame for the story.
Part One
Yuri's (Omar Shariff) mother dies, he inherits a balalaika and is moved to Moscow by his family's friends. In 1913 he becomes engaged to Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), the daughter of the Gromekos who had given him lodging.
Lara (Julie Christie), 17, is in love with her idealistic friend Pasha. She is raped by Victor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), an influential figure in the city and her mother's lover. During a riot Pasha (Tom Courtenay) is wounded. Lara becomes an accomplice, hiding a pistol he has picked up.
The camera focuses particularly on the horses and a pair of broken glasses.
Lara's mother is upset about her daughter's perceived relationship with Victor. Komarovsky is jealous of Pasha. Lara goes to a party where she shoots Komarovsky with the stolen pistol. Pasha rescues her and they have to leave Moscow because of Komarovsky's position in the city.
The pomp and pageantry of the party versus the uprising outside in the streets.
Then war breaks out. Yuri becomes a field doctor where he and Lara meet. Pasha is involved in the war, but unreachable.
Lara and Yuri fall in love, but it remains a passion. When Yuri returns to Moscow (where his son and wife still reside), his poems are seen as anticommunist and banned. Yevgraf provides him and his family with documents to leave for the Gromekos' house near Yuriatin. The focus here is on the eyes, with Yuri's gazes getting darker and darker.
Part Two
In the second part we are on the train ride. Yuri is captured and taken to Strelnikov. Here he recognises Pasha and Yuri learns that Lara now lives in Yuriatin. Yuri returns to his family and they live in a smaller house, because the Bolsheviks have occupied the large house.
Yuri begins a relationship with Lara and with the birth of the second child, the relationship ends. He is forced to become part of the communist struggle. After two years of war, he returns to Yuriatin. In the meantime, Tonya and her two children have been deported to Paris. Tonya is extremely sympathetic and maternal.
Tonya sends a letter (sealed) for Yuri to Lara. Tonya's understanding of her husband is especially important. Then the relationship between Yuri and Lara resumes, which according to this viewer contains some of the most beautiful scenes between two lovers. (A fact that inspired my collection Bitterlemoene). The idyll is broken by Komarovsky's unexpected visit. They are visited because of Lara's marriage to Pasha. Komarovsky offers help for their escape, but Yuri refuses. He then begins the famous Lara poems and they hide in Varykino. These poems bring fame, but tremendous political opposition too.
Read here the poems that appear at the back of the novel.
Again, Komarovsky's actions have a dramatic impact: first the rape of Lara and then the threat when he arrives with troops. He claims that Lara could stay there on her own, because she had to flush out her husband on behalf of the envoys. In the meantime, he has committed suicide.
And Lara is threatened with arrest. So she is forced to leave with Komarovsky and on the train she confesses that she is pregnant with Yuri's child.
Is Komarovsky just evil or finally also a saviour?
Yevgraf looks after his half-brother and finds him a job in Moscow. Alec Guinness' performance is a tour de force. His presence is filled with subtext and implication.
And when Yuri is riding on a tram he sees Lara walking down the street. However, he dies of a heart attack before he can reach her. One of the most painful moments in the film takes you back to that moment when Lara reads the poems – written for her – in the winter cold.
“It's not me …” she whispers in pain, portrayed by the beautiful Julie Christie.
At Yuri's funeral, she asks Yevgraf to help her search for her and Yuri's daughter who had disappeared during the war. The search in orphanages yields nothing. The child, Tanya, tells her that her father, Komarovsky, had let go of her hand during a bombing.
A real father wouldn't have done that, we learn.
And Tanya plays the balalaika. And so the ending closes with the beginning of the film. Indeed a frame narrative that encompasses everything.
The commentary on the DVD is insightful. What flowers were used in the scene to indicate the transience of everything? Daffodils.
Sunflowers: The falling of the leaves indicates the transience of everything ...
Rod Steiger says that when he had to dance with Julie Christie, it would only work when she stood on his boots and he could make her twirl. He also ignored Lean's instructions time and again and still helped create an exceptional moment. Like a slap in the face. Luckily, only with a glove.
Geraldine Chaplin confesses that she based her role on her mother's understanding of artists.
A real accident (the woman giving the baby to Zhivago) becomes part of the film. And Lean ordering everything to go ahead. Get the double, please.
And we learn how Pasternak's novel was first translated into Italian and Carlo Ponti wanted to cast his wife, Sophia Loren, as Lara. But she was too tall.
The hairstyles, according to the costume designer, reveal that they were done in the 1960's.
Leaves were hand-painted to represent the different seasons. Actors wore thick clothing in the heat outside Madrid where the film was made. Due to the ban on Pasternak's novel, it could not be produced in Russia.
We also hear that Julie Christie, a renowned Shakespearean actress, would rather be on stage.
Pasternak translated Shakespeare when his novel was banned and he had to refuse the Nobel Prize.
And this film lost at the 38th Academy Awards to the other popular film for Best Picture and Best Director: The Sound of Music.
An important film, even though a grumpy old man once slammed it in The New York Times as a romanticisation of war. Missing the point completely.
Another called it a “spectacular soap opera”.
Watch it as a film and see how deftly David Lean weaves two stories together, almost like someone riding a bus with a plane flying overhead. To the same destination, but on different trajectories.
Both the novel (1957) and the film (1965) remain landmarks. Forever. With David Lean as the master director of this epic film.
With everything observed through Omar Shariff's eyes.
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak is published by Vintage Books and costs R438 at Amazon SA.
♦ VWB ♦
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Joan Hambidge is a literary scholar and award-winning poet. Her new novel, Stasies, was published by Protea Boekhuis.
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