Anna Karenina: Vronsky's Story (Russian: Анна Каренина. История Вронского, romanized: Anna Karenina. Istoriya Vronskogo) is a 2017 Russian drama film directed by Karen Shakhnazarov. An expanded eight-part version titled Anna Karenina aired on the Russia-1 television channel.
It is a free adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's 1878 novel of the same name which also combines the publicistic story "During the Japanese War" and the literary cycle "Stories about the Japanese War" by Vikenty Veresaev.
Contents
Plot
The film unfolds along two interconnected storylines; the events take place in the second half of the 19th century in the Russian Empire (1872–1875) and in the early 20th century during the Russo-Japanese War in China (1904). It begins thirty years after the tragic death of Anna Karenina, on the battlefields of the Russo-Japanese War — a setting not described in Tolstoy's novel.
The main narrative is set in 1904. Heavy fighting rages in Manchuria. A field hospital is shown being evacuated in the midst of a hasty Russian retreat. Amid the chaos, the chief doctor and the hospital superintendent go missing; a young doctor, Sergey Alexeyevich Karenin, is the only man qualified to replace them both. In a semi-abandoned Chinese village where the hospital has been relocated after the retreat, Karenin completes a risky operation to save the life of a wounded colonel - Count Alexey Kirillovich Vronsky.
That night, Sergey visits Vronsky’s ward and asks him to explain why his mother Anna — whom the count had known thirty years earlier — threw herself under a train, and whether anything could have changed the course of that fateful day. Although the aged Vronsky cautions Sergey that every person has their own truth, he agrees to recount the story of his and Anna's love, and in the process confronts his own lingering guilt over her disgrace and death.
Cast
Elizaveta Boyarskaya as Anna Karenina
Maksim Matveyev as Vronsky
Kirill Grebenshchikov as Sergey Karenin
Vitali Kishchenko as Karenin
Vladimir Ilyin as General
Dmitry Miller as Aleksandr, Vronsky's brother
Tatyana Lyutaeva as Countess Vronskaya
Viktoriya Isakova as Dolly
Evdokiya Germanova as Countess Kartasova
Ivan Kolesnikov as Stepan Arkadievich Oblonsky
Anastasiya Makeyeva as Betsi Tverskaya
Reception
The majority of viewers reacted negatively to the film. Anna Karenina: Vronsky's Story has an approval rating of 20% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 5 reviews, and an average rating of 4/10