‘Doctor Zhivago’ – Love and the revolution of hearts

December 7 2015

Does a film made 50 years ago still resonate as it hits the big screen again…

REGARDED as one of the great love stories of the 20th century, the film “Doctor Zhivago” doesn’t fail to stir.

Now playing across the country in a new 4K digital restoration marking its 50th anniversary, it is also one of the main films in the British Film Institute’s (BFI Love Season/ #BFiLove), which concludes it winter run this month – though screenings for “Doctor Zhivago” run into March 2016.

Set during the tumult of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917, it is a film that charts the beauty and power of romantic love.

Made by one of the iconic directors of the last century, David Lean, it isn’t by any means a straightforward romance.
For a start, the two central protagonists Yuri (Omar Sharif) and Lara (Julie Christie) are more or less married to other people when they first meet.

Yuri (Omar Sharif) and Lara (Julie Christie)

The circumstances of their romance remain messy, complicated and awkward throughout their existence and it is an absorbing and emotionally involving tale from the very start when an influential and powerful Red Army general and half-brother of Yuri interrogates a young woman worker many years later after the main romance.

Lean’s epic style of filmmaking lends itself well to this type of story – death, freedom and heady ideals, make this far more than a boy meets girl flick with a few inconsequential complications to overcome – as is mostly the way with modern romcoms these days.

Christie is luminous as the young Lara, while Sharif emits a powerful sense of righteousness, though there is a level of compromise – after all, for a time, he loves two women, both Lara as his mistress and Tonya (Geraldine Chapman) his childhood sweetheart, wife and the mother of his first child.

He is a passionate and caring doctor; a celebrated poet too and a gentleman…apart from the above romantic entanglement. It’s strange that this aspect of the film is quietly overlooked or is it just an acceptance that in times of war and civil conflict such things are likely/possible/excusable? Or is it just plain chauvinism? Or is it that love is a terribly complicated business and we should not see it in classically binary (or modern) terms.

What is more stirring and inspiring is Lara herself and her belief that Yuri and herself will be together despite the challenges, both personal and societal.

What threatens all this is the villainous character of Komarovsky (Rod Steiger). A thoroughly disreputable figure, he forces himself on Lara when she is no more than a girl and demands her loyalty knowing she is in no position to give it to him as an equal. When the film begins she is a 17-year-old garment worker and her mother is already Komarovsky’s mistress, and he pushes her away to make way for Lara.

Her actions to rid herself of Komarovsky impress and first catch the eye of Yuri and the love story begins to unfold.
Still, Lara’s first husband is a driven and politicised figure – who believes wholeheartedly in the revolution and the cause of the workers. There is a sense in which the Bolsheviks are fighting injustice and terror, deployed by the Tsar and the state.

Yuri, his family (wife and her father) and Komarovsky might all be seen as ‘enemies’ of the Bolsheviks, as they occupy the middle and moneyed classes but Lean hints that it’s better to join a winning force than give yourself to the purity of some ideology that is at best compromised (how much you wonder do the ordinary ranks of Daesh/ISIS swell with those who have little real belief in the ideology, but acquiesce to it as a means of basic self-preservation and a quieter existence).

That idea comes to the fore when it is clear that Katya, Lara’s child from her first marriage becomes Yuri’s and Lara’s priority.

The end isn’t really what you expect… “Doctor Zhivago” is terribly Russian in that regard, but it also shows that love is a powerful force and moves men and women who are touched by it to extraordinary courage and hope – all contained within an idea that the future will, indeed, be better than the past…and that the children of such affairs will be free, free, free…

ACV rating:**** (out of five)

For full national listings of ‘Doctor Zhivago’, please see
http://www.bfi.org.uk/whats-on/bfi-film-releases/doctor-zhivago