No Peace for “War and Peace”
“Playing the past is a reaction to the present,” the marvelous Italian actor Alessio Boni (pictured) told me during a conversation in New York last June. Boni plays Prince Andrei in a European production of “War and Peace” that was just shown on Italian television and that I hope is shown in the United States at some point. Boni’s past-is-the-present remark seems especially apt right now. Though never absent from discussions of great literature, “War and Peace” is having one of its periodic eruptions into mass-media consciousness. There is a new English translation by the husband-and-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and, less door-stoppingly, a new volume by Andrew Bromfield which is based on an earlier version of the novel never published in Tolstoy’s lifetime. The Bromfield eliminates most of the conversations in French and allows Prince Andrei to survive the Battle of Borodino, which is dramatically almost as absurd as the 19th-century stagings of “King Lear” which did away with the death of Cordelia.
Meanwhile, the epic 1968 movie “War and Peace,” directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, has been packing them in at New York’s Film Forum. This almost-eight-hour adaptation, produced at the height of the Cold War, is still said to be the most expensive movie ever made — roughly $500 million, in 2007 dollars. Its Battle of Borodino, with 100,000 extras, is absolutely jaw-dropping and the hand-held camera shots were revolutionary for their era. The art-film touches — split screens, trippy wipes and dissolves — are almost quaint. The kitschy, sky-tracking ruminations about nature and the universe are risible. What’s more, I miss terribly some of the major characters (Boris, Nicholas Rostov) who have been nearly done away with to make this the Andrei-Natasha-Pierre Show. But there’s primal power in some of the scenes: a farewell between Andrei and his father is absolutely gut-wrenching. A DVD version exists of this epic, but nothing compares with seeing the battles on the big screen.
