Dr. Zhivago - the novel and the movie
Well the tile of the thread says it all... I read Doctor Zhivago, I finally got to see the movie, which i was curious about, so I wonder if there's someone who wants to discuss it.
I enjoyed both the book and the movie. At first I was a bit disappointed in the movie cos I was waiting for everything to be exactly like in the book, but it wasnt...of course I know it's not meant to be the same, but I can't help having such expectation.
It seems to me that in the movie Lara was more involved with Komarovsky than in the book...In the book she's sort of attracted to him but she despises him a lot too, in the film she seems more to be pretending to despise him... I didn't like Lara much in the movie, especially in the first part. Even in the book, she wasn't my favourite because she is so perfect...and I hate figures of perfect women. Though i didnt manage to hate Lara, cos she was portrayed very well (in the book), but still too perfect to me. Yes, i preferred Tonya, she felt more real to me (even if my mum made me notice that she was 'betrayed and happy with it'...). It felt in a way like the eternal fight between the good, blck-haired woman, and the perfect blonde one, which the other can't equal no matter what. Maybe in the film even more, after all blonde in the 60s was considered close to perfection, if I'm not wrong.
And in this cases, I can't help being on the 'loser's side (and especially, not on the blonde's side). Btw, I was wondering... does the book describe Tonya as black-haired and Lara as blonde? I guess so, cos that's how I expected them to be...
Talking of appearances, I would have liked Zhivago to look different in the movie, just because in my imagination he was different...more feminine in a way, I guess even his appearance should have looked 'sensitive' to me.
I think that the character that came out better in the movie was that of Antipov-Strelnikov. Again i don't particularly agree with the look, but he expressed such strength...Even if again, in the book he was deeper I think, his choices had a deeper explanation. But the movie seems to sum up a lot. I actually think in this case the expectations from the book spoiled the movie for me a bit, cos it feels much more superficial and simplistic compared to the book...but of course, if it had followed it literally it would be at least 6 hours long...
Any more thoughts for discussion? I'd like to comment more on the book, but I need some input as I have the movie's impressions first in my mind now...And the book is a vast material for discussion. I read it in a long time, sometimes not touching it for a few weeks, and dspite this I never got realyl lost, even if the plot wasn't the simplest, especially at the beginning. There is some detai that got lost in this process but I'm surprised I didnt have to start it again at some point as i feared..
words from zhivago himself
...I will never forget those days in Varykino, where me and a Woman of my life spent time loving each other endlessly. Endlessly. I wish it could be so.
And the feeling when I let Her and Katya go with Komarovskiy...
Why?...
I am still in doubt... maybe I thought that I wasn't worth Lara, I didn't deserve Her.......
I wanted Her and Katya to live a better life....
...probably I was mistaken
Dr. Zhivago and My Lara: A Comparison
A NEW LIFE AND A NEW LARA:yawnb:
Ten weeks after I had come to the firmest and most realistic of decisions I had yet made regarding my future career—the decision to become a primary school teacher--the film Dr. Zhivago was released. During my pre-adult life(1963-1944), I had wanted to be a bricklayer, a fireman and a professional baseball player--in that order. My career as a primary school teacher also proved unrealistic and was short-lived, although it proved to be much more realistic than those other three alternatives mentioned above, all of which were early life enthusiasms born of childhood and adolescent play and dreams.
On 22 December 1965, the day that the film Dr. Zhivago was released, I was on my way to a Baha’i youth winter school at the University of Waterloo campus in Waterloo Ontario. The film was shot in the previous months while my father lay dying in Dundas Ontario, while my mother was finishing her working life and retiring and while I was majoring in history, philosophy and sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario. In the first year(22/12/65-22/12/66) of the release of Dr. Zhivago, a film that became one of the most popular 20th century movies, I moved to Windsor to study under Dr. Jameson Bond, an anthropologist at the University of Windsor and a Baha’i who had lived in the high Arctic for a dozen years; I also began my teacher training and started a relationship with Miss Judy Gower whom I married in August 1967.
After pondering with some anxiety for eight months(12/65-8/66) the decision to teach school in the Canadian Arctic and after finishing my degree; after selling ice-cream for the Good Humour Company for three summer months and after attending a one week Baha’i youth training institute in Michigan, I left my home town, family and friends and started teaching career on Baffin Island among the Inuit. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 30 March 2008.
I knew nothing of Dr. Zhivago
until years later and little of the
Russian revolution or communism,
for that matter, although I had studied
Marx’s Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts.1 I had discovered my
own romance not unlike Zhivago’s in
a revolution of quite another order in a
snow-bound world of quite another time.
With tragedy and a new high-seriousness
built into my daily life and with decisions
made---the enterprize all came to naught:
the north, the Arctic, the Eskimos, health,
marriage, career and, like Zhivago, I found
an inner poetic beauty, a new life and--like
Zhivago--I created one with my own Lara2
and life went on and on toward my own
mysterious end which has not yet come.
1 Written by Karl Marx in the summer of 1844.
2 While married, but separated from my first wife, I formed a relationship with a woman who became my second wife in December 1975.
Ron Price
30 March 2008
