Makes No Difference

Anna Karenina.

Yes.

Badly.

You know when you have a feeling the movie you’re about to watch is going to be important to you in some way; by something you’ll discover in it, regardless of the fact you already know the story. There’s a hidden gem in it, and you need to see it, hear it, read it, at the specific time in your life when that specific message needs to be received by you.

Not sooner. Or later. Just THEN.

I was supposed to watch this movie 6 or 7 times in 4 different cities around the globe, and every time I was about to watch it, something happened to make it impossible, or move me from it; thus I figured, I wasn’t ready.

There is a specific emotion you have to be in to see certain things at a specific time, to realize something. Isn’t life grand, how that happens? And isn’t it scary how sometimes, or more often than sometimes - life is pretty damn predetermined, and there’s this whole scenario brewing for you to receive later on while you dwell on mundane things in the present, which won’t even matter to you in the grand scheme of things.

Christ, how unimportant we all are? And so damn important all at the same time?

Everything is already there, the hurt, beauty, happiness, pain, love, lust, disappointments, challenges.....we only have to live it.

Aside from the fact this movie visually gave me more orgasms than the real living person - from the theater stages developing into the movement or movements metamorphosing into the theater stage; from choreographed office scenes to the subliminal costumes you want to take and obliviously wear in present times regardless of laughs, the pain and frustrations Keira Knightly so realistically and painfully transformed onto me; the story.

We all know the story. It’s been told and made for screen dozens of times. And that’s exactly my fascination with it. How universal it is. How it can be written in 1870’s and get every single emotion relatable to every single human being of any period or place on this planet.

Fidelity, jealousy, passion, lust. I wondered what Joe Wright thought he can bring to this adaptation that’s been done gazillions of times before I went to see it, but Joe delivers. Joe delivers with stages, choreography, an unexpected but phenomenal cast.

This Karenina can not be explained with words. It has to be experienced!

The story. The one we read, watched, and lived (minus the train part, bless).

And we all did.

We all experienced lust and passion beyond reason when you know you can’t but you absolutely have to. It demands of you. It militates you. Because it’s lust. And lust is the most powerful of them all. It’s not love. It’s not sex. Love is calm, sweet, rewarding, fulfilling in a very unaggressive way. Sex is physical, it doesn’t demand anything of us, nothing we don’t want to give, and even if we don’t but we do, it’s all done in a blink, and we get up, get dressed, and we’re not altered.

Not if we don’t want to be; we have a choice.

But lust?

Lust can’t be controlled. Passion can’t be controlled. And it can’t be ignored. It screws with you because it’s not simple or one-sided. It’s layered. It has love and sex mixed in it. It’s physical and mental and emotional, and consuming all at the same time.

Lust is absorbing.

Lust is difficult to deal with it when there’s nothing else you have to deal with. But when there’s a fidelity issue thrown in it? When there’s fidelity, society, and self thrown in the mix?

The parallels of human conduct are what made Anna Karenina - “the greatest novel ever written”. Because it contrasted something so overwhelming with restraint. Because it juxtaposed an arid marriage with the inevitableness of passion. Because Tolstoy searched the self and the existence; the place OF self IN THE existence so monumentally; it still gives shivers.

And what made it tragic is not the ending with the train, it’s just that - the self. How we feed our SELF with what it needs, knowing it will be the same matter that will eventually destroy our SELF.

THE INEVITABLENESS.

And god, the dialog is monumental.

Anna: “This is wrong.

Vronsky: “Makes no difference.”

Anna: “You have no right.”

Vronsky: “Makes no difference.”

Anna: “Because I’m so happy. Not to think. Only to live, only to feel.”

Anna: “If you have any thought for me you will give me back my peace!”

Vronsky: “There can be no peace for us, only misery and greatest happiness.”

Were you ever with someone you weren’t supposed to be with but you simply had to? It’s literally only misery and the greatest happiness.

My favorite scene in the movie is when Anna returns home from being with Count Vronsky, trying to sneak into the house, where her husband is still awake, waiting. She’s all absorbed in her emotions and passions, flying through the air, like we all are when we’re drugged with love & lust, but her husband stops her. He wants to talk. He asks her where she’s been. And instead of lying or pretending, she’s annoyed he’s even asking her questions and instead wants to relish in her bliss-ness of almost a teenage-like love which can’t even be bothered with something so substantial as one's husband.

She turns towards him, tells him where she’s been, and claims that she’s tired; and needs to go to her room. Completely oblivious to what's right and wrong, so absorbed in her passion and in her SELF, powerless to both.

The powerless-ness. Explained best in one of my favorite quotes of all times, in the words of Marquis De Sade -

“Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.”

And that it does. Every single one.