Sarik Andreasyan guaranteed to give the audience goosebumps with the new “Onegin”. She deliberately aged the novel’s characters by 15 to 20 years.

Frame from the movie “Onegin” (2024)

It seems that Sarik Andreasyan cannot be stopped: the director, whom the public associated with controversial comedies, has now changed tactics and tackles only over-the-top, win-win topics: Chikatilo, Vitaly Kaloev, Angarsk maniac, Skopinsky maniac, Bukins , Rita Gracheva with severed hands, a miracle in the cornfield, and now… the director and producer pointed to the sacred, to our everything, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. Sarik directed the film “Onegin”, the full preview of which was presented the other day.

In the four-minute 4K trailer for Onegin, we see that the narrator addressing the viewer on behalf of Pushkin is Vladimir Vdovichenkov, and the lead role is assigned to Viktor Dobronravov. At the same time, the text of the script is not a copy of Pushkin’s novel, it is an adaptation into modern language interspersed with the text of the classic.

“I took root in this material a long time ago, but cinema is a completely different world, and the character that appears in the film is very different from the one in our play,” explains the actor who played Onegin in the stage production. from the Vakhtangov Theater. “For me, this is a new step forward in the knowledge and search for this image.

The film was shot in bright, vivid colors in picturesque corners of Russia, while the audience who watched the trailer immediately noted the similarity of the aesthetics of “Onegin” with British films and famous period dramas (“Pride and Prejudice “, “Wives and daughters”). ”, “North and South” “, “Cranford”, etc.), as well as Vera Glagoleva’s film “Two Women” with Ralph Fiennes, a film adaptation of Turgenev’s play “A Month in the Country”.

Still from the film “Onegin” (1999)

They began to compare Sarik Andreasyan’s next film with “Onegin” from 1999, where Fiennes also starred. In the latest Russian adaptation of the novel, the main role of the “young rake” Evgeniy Onegin, who is 18 years old at the beginning of the novel and about 26 at the end, was played by 40-year-old Viktor. Dobronravov.

The role of his colleague and friend, and then his rival Vladimir Lensky, was played by Denis Prytkov (he will celebrate 30 years on February 14). Tatiana’s sister Olga was played by Tatiana Sabinova; Alena Khmelnitskaya took on the role of the Larins’ mother.

“At first we decided that our characters would be 10 to 15 years older than Pushkin’s,” Andreasyan explained. — This was important, because I don’t see my heroes as teenagers. The criteria for life and age have changed a lot, and the previous 25 years are today’s 40. I am not ready to follow a love story in which the heroes are between 13 and 18 years old (according to one of the erroneous versions of researchers, Tatyana Larina could be 13 years old at the time of writing the letter (Onegin – Author). It would be a completely different tone. As a director, I don’t want to do this.

The novel’s second essentially main character, Tatyana Larina (about 17 years old in the novel), was played by Lisa Moryak, the director’s wife.

Despite the avalanche of negativity in the comments under the announcement video, Andreasyan is confident that the adaptation turned out to be a success and viewers will get goosebumps. He compares the cinematic language in which the story of Onegin and Larina is told to the aesthetics of Baz Luhrmann’s luxury Hollywood melodrama, The Great Gatsby.

The premiere of the film “Onegin” is scheduled for March 7, 2024.