The Beautiful Lie as an Adaptation of Anna Karenina
ABC’s ‘The Critic’s Luke Buckmaster states that “one of the reasons Anna Karenina still a relevant text today are the key themes and key messages of infidelity, yearning for love and broken relationships which are never going to fall out of relevance.”
One of the great virtues of the adaption of Anna Karenina’s‘ The Beautiful Lie’ is that it relies on the story from the original author Tolstoy to understand the perspectives of the other characters, in turn, allowing the viewer to sympathise and empathise with a wider variety of views. Even Skeet who is at a first glance superficial and careless with other people’s feelings has moments of great honesty and insight. Now let’s address the old saying that has followed screen adaptation studies since the beginning of film itself. can any screen version be as good as the book? Therefore, Is the new ABC miniseries ‘The Beautiful Lie’ the latest film adaptation of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy as good as the book? As with ‘The Beautiful Lie’ the adaptations of the novel on screen take us to a very different creative territory, given a contemporary makeover by the writers of ‘The Beautiful Lie’ Alice Bell and Jonathan Gavin. In the show, Anna and Alexander’s status as modern-day tennis celebrities help guide their transition from Tolstoy’s 19th century Russia to 21st century Australia within a familiar context while Vronsky’s military power translates into that of independent record producer Skeet.
The script also has a particularly Australian setting instead of replicating 19th-century Russia, the writer’s Bell and Gavin create a contemporary Australian family drama compelling to their 21st-century audience.
Everyone plays in a decidedly Australian cultural and geographical context. But what is handled with the greatest in this modern version of Anna Karenina is the humor that is often left out of the adaptations of Russian realistic literature. The marriage fights of Anna’s brother Kingsley and his wife dolly has been able to successfully integrate a type of soft comedy and kittys teenage anguish plays a to that in a similar way.
The series takes us one step closer to the heat of the matter in a more unusual integration of the narrative voice. the adaptation of the first-person narration from book to the screen is traditionally considered as problematic in the sense of how does the visual narrator translates the first-person narrative through the camera lens that sees everything? Well, voiceover is used sparingly on the screen, in this adaptation Annas dominant voiceover positions us with her from the beginning as a way of filtering our experience of the drama as it unfolds and creating an intimacy with the viewer. It takes the drama to a different emotional territory but is universally relevant for the type of audience from the 21st century. ‘The Beautiful Lie’ is a recount that tells the story in a way that differs from Tolstoy’s realistic mode of narration.
