Es Maswell Howse? asks Brother Black

“Es Maswell Howse?” asks Brother Black.Mugs are drained, then ceremoniously smashed They embrace – “I love you” say the subtitles. The wife reappears with a tray of coffee – the luridly blue Maxwell House jar and two matching mugs, one with “Julio El Boss” on it. And the hall of her lovely Spanish Country top-of-the-range Wilmslow-of-Rio-style home absolutely isn’t Elle Deco either.Her husband – white jacket, stubble – growls in Spanish as Black Hat walks through the heavily-coffered front door: “You’re not welcome in my house”; then, deliciously, you see his white trousers are tucked into short black boots So are his visitor’s black trousers; those dumb bootees They’re twins, doing a face-on confrontation. She’s the South American Way – big black hair, jewellery, cleavage – absolutely not the aspirational girlie you get in Gold Blend commercials. A joke Zorro figure – big black hat and dark glasses – is outlined in the front door saying something Scorchio-ish very aggressively.Cut to a woman like you don’t get them now. It’s not even that good – half high Eighties, half spaghetti western, with “Bollywood” overtones – but I’m on the floor the moment the gravy-dark Spanish voice- over gets going.
It opens with “Maxwell House” filling the screen diagonally like a Forties drama movie.

Big garden, picket fence and crimson flowers – they’ve turned the colour up full volume “Maswell Howse” says Senor Grande Cojones “Episode 747 – Oh Brother!” say the subtitles. The writers of the new Maxwell House commercial obviously think so too. The formerly well-known instant coffee-style beverage (it hasn’t had much advertising support recently) is relaunched with a spoof of one of those late-night post-Dynasty dubbed or subbed Globo soaps. Like other Fast Show catchphrases, it illustrates an Eternal Verity – that Hispanic television and advertising are terribly funny and marvellously old-fashioned to the Anglo eye. I’m afraid I’ll be saying “Boutros Boutros-Ghali” and “Scorchio” in 2015 And I won’t be alone.

Likewise, bathwater, however hot, is heated still further by warmer water poured into it from a tap. Pushkin, the genius, is the hot bathwater and Fiennes, the tyro, the cooler tapwater. When the two are combined, the temperature is necessarily lowered.Or, to have recourse to an even more simplistic metaphor, Pushkin and Fiennes are like vodka and water Onegin is a work not of adaptation but of dilution.. It’s really quite elementary – what might be called the hot-and-cold-tap syndrome. Consider: no matter how warm tapwater is, if it’s poured into a bathtub half-filled with even warmer water, it cools it down. Why? Mystere, as the French say.It’s especially mysterious as he, too, was unintimidated by classic texts (he made film versions of Verga, Dostoevsky, Lampedusa, Mann and D’Annunzio); but he was perhaps the supreme exception to the rule that, in the cinema, the better the work adapted, the worse the adaptation is likely to be. Marshalling scores of extras, zooming into one glittering objet d’art after another, positively wallowing in all the crystal and ormolu, he seemed to make his sumptuous period films in exactly the same way television directors make their classic serials Yet his are masterly and theirs aren’t.

In Onegin, unbecomingly dressed and coiffed, she has reverted to pre-Cookie type, her beautiful oval features a black hole from which neither meaning nor emotion is allowed to escape.As for Martha Fiennes’s visual style, the model would appear to be Visconti, and the plushly upholstered banality of her mise en scene only confirms what an enigmatic artist he was. A few months ago, praising her deliciously gangly presence in Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune, I called her that film’s revelation I was premature. It’s almost as though his sister had an enormous placard placed on the set throughout the shoot on which she scribbled: “Be blase, darling!” He does wear the clothes well, however: every time he sits down, he shoots the tails of his frock coat even more expertly than he shoots his cuffs.Liv Tyler is Tatyana. I’m not sure what his relation is to the other two: the press kit describes him merely as “another talented member of the Fiennes family”.As the jaded fop who languidly pooh-poohs a daring declaration of love from the sister, Tatyana, of his friend Lensky’s fiancee, only to fall headlong in love with her once she is married to another, Ralph Fiennes is much too old for the role (he looks as haggard at the beginning as he should at the end) and gives, to be honest, a rather Johnny-One-Note performance. Martha Fiennes is the sister of Ralph Fiennes, who is both its leading man and its executive producer. The composer of the syrupy soundtrack score is Magnus Fiennes. And the denouement (which the film, to its credit, though equally to its disadvantage as a satisfying evening out at the movies, refuses to betray) is entirely bereft of climactic punchiness.

Eugene Onegin is famously untranslatable – I recall how, at university, my old Russian professor would struggle to convince his sceptical class that, when Pushkin employed the word for a tree, he contrived, by some alchemical process inexplicable even to native speakers, to invest that word not only with the sound made by the wind rustling through leaves but also with the odour of gnarled roots buried deep in the earth – and it therefore cannot be translated into film.The film exists, though, so what’s there to say about it? It may not be a vanity project, but it certainly feels like it. The novel’s atmospheric trappings (see above) are just as common to the worst as to the best of classic Russian fiction. What’s the point? Pushkin is one of the most adapted and adaptable of authors – his work has inspired numerous operas, ballets, song-cycles and the like – but even the Russians themselves have shied from recasting his most celebrated fiction in cinematic form.Divorced from the poetry, the irony and the pungent wit of Pushkin’s narrative voice, the plot is trite and hand-me-down (not a problem in Tchaikovsky’s opera). They miss nary a one.
All right, you reply, point taken, but how can these visual stereotypes be avoided when you film Eugene Onegin? Actually, there are several legitimate answers to that question, the most evident being: you just don’t film Eugene Onegin. Even a bejewelled old princess playing endless games of solitaire in bed. If, during a cultural free-association test, you were requested to say whatever popped into your mind on hearing the phrase “Russian literature”, I guarantee that virtually everything you’d think of is up there on the screen Snow, naturally, tons and tons of the stuff St Petersburg Skaters on the frozen Neva A misty-morning duel A genteel musical soiree A languorously Byronic dandy A plump, red-faced babushka A country estate going to elegant seed.