A Farewell to Yuriatin.

Rating: 7/10 (3 October 2009)

What a remarkable eye David Lean has for visual imagery. Two hundred years ago, without a camera, he might have been a painter. Not a Cezanne maybe but an Andrew Wyeth. Not much love but lots of precision. What a host of golden daffodils.
Example: Omar Sheriff is Yuri Zhivago who has trekked miles across the windswept snows of Russia during the Civil War that followed the revolution. He's a deserter and all alone. He's been on his own for months. Finally he reaches the house of his erstwhile lover, Julie Christie. His eyes fill with tears as he surveys the bleak, empty apartment that he will call home, at least for a while.
He stumbles exhausted into the bedroom, stares at the bed where he and Christie slept together long ago, then catches sight of himself in the mirror. He's a physical wreck. His face is an oily white, his facial hair a frozen muff. His clothes are tattered rags wrapped around his trembling body.
And -- get this -- there is still a bit of snow on his clothing and the snow-soaked wool is STEAMING in the slight heat of the room. The shot only lasts one or two seconds. In the name of Bog, would anyone but Lean have thought of such a slight detail? There are other moments that might make the hair of the vulnerable rise.
A passenger train stuffed with refugees has been chugging along eastward and is shunted on to a spur to allow the passage of an express. The passenger train is dilapidated, without toilets, without chairs, nothing. Each car has a single stove that throws negligible heat. The floors are covered with hay and disinfectants. While the train sits silently, some of its passengers step out into the snow to stretch their legs and grumble at the delay. Then the express appears on the horizon. It's the personal train of Strelnikov, Tom Courtenay, and it's panels are painted red and its crossed red flags are whipping in the wind as it roars past the astonished pedestrians. WHOOOOOSH! And it disappears in a swirl of snow.
The story itself is, to me, less interesting than the film as a whole. It reminds me of "Crime and Punishment", in which everyone seems to know everyone else, as if Petersberg were a small village. This tale is long, a little confusing, criss-crossed with meetings between men and women who are relatives, old friends, present or past lovers, or virtual strangers. History is pitted against human emotions like love. It's either one or the other. You can't have your babka and eat it too.
There is an abundance of suffering with brief interludes of serenity that are always disrupted by historical events. Zhivago is in love with Lara but is married to someone else, Geraldine Chaplin. He has children by both. Well -- as I said, it's not ALL suffering.
What impressed me as much as the striking visuals, as much as the Jack Frost window prints dissolving into a field of nodding jonquils, was the fact that, as narrator Alec Guiness puts it, "He was a Russian and Russians love poetry." By the time Sheriff passes from the scene, he's a nationally famous figure, adored by all. Why? Because he wrote such splendid poetry. What a queer country, right? (Question for Americans: Who is our Poet Laureate?) I've had a young Russian, who's self-taught English was no more than two years old, point out to me contradictions in a famous poem by Robert Frost.
I don't know why so many of us find a love for poetry to be effete, not masculine or practical enough. General Patton wrote poetry. The commanders of the armies of ancient Greece wrote poems on the nights before battles. The Japanese warriors of World War II left poems behind for their loved ones before suicide missions. Yet, for Americans, such an amour fou implies one foot in fairydom.