There's a five-minute tracking shot in the middle of Joe Wright's 2007 film�Atonement�that is impossible to forget once you've seen it. A wounded Robbie (James McAvoy) is on the beach at Dunkirk, waiting to be evacuated, and in a nightmarish, beautiful single Steadicam take he wanders past crowds of soldiers, burning cars, horses being shot, a beached ship, a choir singing, the ferris wheel still spinning in the ruined background. It's a mind-boggling piece of work, requiring immaculate timing and choreography, and it takes you right out of the movie because it's there to show off. �
As impressive as it is from a production standpoint, the shot takes your focus away from the story and puts it on the mechanics of what's happening on screen.
Wright's new adaptation of�Tolstoy's�Anna Karenina�lives in the hollow clockwork world of that shot. From a filmmaking perspective, it's a gorgeous shadowbox of a production, filmed largely in a single location: a set resembling a run-down theater that was built on a Shepperton Studios sound stage. It starts with the sounds of an unseen audience settling down ? there are no visible viewers of this story other than ourselves ? and closes in on a�proscenium arch as a curtain goes up. The scrim behind it reads "Imperial Russia, 1874."
Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) is on stage, receiving a shave. When a door opens off the side, it is to a snowy street exterior in Moscow. He pays a visit to the family governess he's having a fling with, and when he heads home, through a backstage area, he opens a door to see his wife Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) weeping over evidence of his infidelity. The scene sets the story into motion as his sister…
Anna Faris Anna Friel Anna Kournikova Anna Paquin AnnaLynne McCord Anne Marie Kortright April Scott Arielle Kebbel
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