Matching Pasternak In Images

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31057, 12 May 1966, Page 15

Matching Pasternak In Images

The greater a novel Is, the harder its translation to the screen usually becomes. It is not enough simply to preserve the narrative outline: there has to be some feeling for the work’s distinctive qualities, writes a film critic of “The Times.”

Not the least of the merits of “Doctor Zhivago” is that David Lean and Robert Bolt, its director and writer, have attempted to catch something of Pasternak’s poetic feeling for nature and awareness of the power of destiny. The result is a film that, despite certain flaws, is several cuts above the conventional screen epic. Perhaps the first thing one should stress about the film is that it is often breath-

takingly beautiful to look at In “Lawrence of Arabia” Lean and his director of photography, Freddie Young, showed how the desert can change its aspect as the light alters.

Here they go one better with snowscapes that are sometimes literally dazzling and some equally memorable interiors.

Repeatedly, there are images that stamp themselves on the retina: the white northern night glimpsed through an aperture in a railway truck; a room covered from floor to ceiling in a thin film of ice; spring sunlight filtering through tall pine trees, irradiating a group of men on horseback. Lean and Young have matched Pasternak’s descrip-

tlons with beauties of their own. Robert Bolt’s screenplay, in tracing the hero’s slowly developing conflict between his devotion to his wife and family and his love for the eternally desirable Lara, sticks pretty closely to the main points of the original. While reminding us of the political context, Bolt also ensures that the characters are not lost sight of against the background of the Russian Revolution. But in the course of compressing the story so skilfully, Bolt has scaled down the hero himself. In particular, his writing of poetry, though much referred to and sometimes shown, seems less an integral part of his life than a valuable pastime.

The film is at its least successful in the introduction of the characters and the establishment of their relationships. Some years ago Lean confessed that he found dialogue a bore, and, allowing for any possible overstatement, it still seems fundamentally true. Superb crafts-

man though he is, the business of exposition does not bring out his best, and it takes the film some little time to get under way. It really takes wing with the train journey of Zhivago and his family to Varykino: from then on Lean is freer to concentrate on the Zhivago-Lara relationship and the magnificent landscape. One can see why Omar Sharif was ehosen to play Zhivago: he combines virility

with sensitivity. At the same time he only half suggests the character’s wide-ranging human sympathy.

Julie Christie’s Lara becomes the more dominant figure, and she conveys Ideally the quality specified by Pasternak: a proud hostility to herself that increases her attractiveness. Miss Christie confirms that she has a keen sense of character as well as tremendous screen presence. SO THEY SAY That wild Stravinsky music, how excited I was the first time I heard it! When I heard it, I first realised that the sweetness and softness of spring is really a huge violent force in action. —Katharine Butler Hathaway