Having won the 2013 TV Connect Industry Awards Best Live Online TV Service or Solution, HyppTV, the TV Service provided by UniFi has given away 10 Video on Demand movies to all their customers from the 18th till the 24th of April. Being, after all, raised as a Chinese by Chinese, it is impossible to resist taking advantage of this freebie. Accordingly, we chose to watch the 2012 Anna Karenina film, directed by Joe Wright and adapted by Tom Stoppard from Leo Tolstoy's 1877 novel.
Similar to other movie reviews, this post will most definitely have SPOILERS!! Fair warning given.
I'd rather not write a lot about the plot here, so if you are dying to know the synopsis, go read it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_(2012_film)
or read about other more mundane details of the film here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1781769/?ref_=sr_1
But let me proceed to the actual review. Leo Tolstoy, being Leo Tolstoy, cannot stop at writing something that is only full of thrilling adventure, but, like Charles Dickens, must have some moral debate in his story.
In the case of Anna Karenina, the moral debate surfaces when she starts an affair with a young, dashing cavalry officer named Count Alexi Vronsky. Although married to Alexei Karenin, who is about 20 years older than her, Anna is unhappy with the marriage due to the fact that Karenin is a workaholic and seems to be a cold and distant person. The question then is this: Is adultery necessarily evil? In this case, can it be right, seeing as there is no love between Anna and Karenin, especially since the love between Anna and Vronsky is a pure love?
Eventually, Anna leaves Karenin, while both parties refuse to get a divorce due to various reasons such as child custody (yes, Anna and Karenin has a son named Seryozha) (Anna will lose custody of Seryozha if she is divorced), and lives with Vronsky. This leads to her being ostracized by society. This then becomes another question: What is the role of society in the life of the individual? Is society meant to lend boundaries to individuals or are individuals the ones who shape society? If an individual, such as Anna, wishes to do something out of the norm, does society have any say in it? These are all thought-provoking questions that may one day urge me to write further.
At the same time, Leo Tolstoy also has a subplot within the novel wherein a wealthy land-owner named Konstatin Dimitrivich Levin proposes to, but is refused by, a girl named Katerina "Kitty" Alexandrovna Shcherbatsky, who, at the time, was being wooed by Vronsky, whom she would rather marry. Obviously, Vronsky drops Kitty in favour of Anna, leaving Kitty heartbroken. After some time, Levin decides to propose to Kitty once again, and this time they get married. It's a happily-ever-after affair. However, the story on this end develops even more. Kitty was previously somewhat of a spoilt child, for want of a better phrase, and when Levin bring her back to his country home, he realizes that she might be disgusted by the other inhabitants, id est, Levin's dying alcoholic brother and his wife, who was formerly a prostitute (at the time, high society would not associate themselves with such people; such things are just not done in Pre-Soviet Russia). To Levin's everlasting surprise, Kitty accepts everything and even begins to take care of Levin's brother...and all this just when we thought the story simply couldn't get more touching.
But this does show us some parallels between the Anna-Karenin couple and the Levin-Kitty couple. The unhappy marriage between Anna and Karenin may be due to the fact that it was possibly a marriage fueled by political ambitions and not love while the love between Levin and Kitty prompts them to sacrifice something or other for one another. However, while love seems to be the main idea in this novel, it seems that the problem lies with society. Once again, without society to dictate the norm, Kitty can cast away former illusions of nobility and can associate with people deemed to be several classes below her.
The end idea is this: Are we to allow society to dictate our actions and thoughts? Is there to be no individuality? Recently, there was the brouhaha which precipitated over the Alvin and Vivian sexblog. In essence, it's the same idea. Why should there be such a boundary which disallows individuals to express themselves especially when there isn't a tangible harm that is caused? On another level, why do so many people wish to impose their own morals on others?
Morals should be on an individual basis. If you have morals, keep them. If you have principles, keep them. But, for the love of 9gags, don't try to be holier-than-thou and impose your morals on the people around you.
P.S. I do enjoy using the word 'brouhaha'. It's amusing.
P.P.S. Immediately after posting this article, I continued reading Heinlein's novel, Stranger In A Strange Land (it's a wonderful book, by the way. You should read it some time.) and I found some dialogue there that was exactly what I'm trying to say.
I quote:
"Please, Jubal. He's got to learn how to behave. I'm trying so hard to train him."
"Hmmph! You're trying to force on him your own narrow-minded, middle class, Blible Belt morality. Don't think I haven't been watching."
"I have not! I haven't concerned myself with his morals; I've simply been teaching him necessary customs."
"Customs, morals - is there a difference? Woman, do you realize what you are doing? Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe, - and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes - make him feel shame if he doesn't have it."
"I'm not doing anything of the sort! I'm just trying to keep him out of trouble. It's for his own good."
Jubal snorted. "That's the excuse they gave the tomcat just before his operation."
Thought-provoking, no?
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