Compelling and Emotional

Rating: 8/10 (24 February 2015)

I've never read the novel by Pasternak on which the movie is based but I had a certain interest in Russian novelist after reading Dostoevskij and so I started watching this movie. I wasn't at all bored even though it was a long and sometimes slow-paced movie, as I expected it to be, because it was compelling for the various themes it encompassed as love, war, politics as a big classic should do. The actors, from Omar Sharif to Julie Christie, are all intense and convincing in their roles. The various settings are also adapt to describe the first decades of of revolutionary Russia in its different faces: the luxurious houses of the decaying nobles that will be taken over by the Communist State, the slums were the poor experience a hard life, the limitless and desert Russian moor, that could be at the same time peaceful in the summer and fatal during the long Russian winters.