Anna Karenina 1997

Anna Karenina, Sophie Marceau is the young and elegant wife of a wealthy Russian nobleman, twenty years her senior, and she carries a quiet discontent that centers on their son Seriozha. At a lavish Moscow ball, she encounters the dashing Count Alexei Vronsky, Sean Bean, whose immediate attraction to her unsettles the rigid expectations of their world. Vronsky follows her to St. Petersburg, pursuing her openly with a blend of charm and audacity, and Anna finds herself drawn into a forbidden romance she had never anticipated.

As the affair deepens, they savor a fragile happiness together, but it is tested by pain and consequence. Anna miscarries Vronsky’s child, a blow that shatters the careful veneer of their daring liaison. Karenin, though wounded, is moved by her distress and momentarily forgives the suffering she endures. Yet the social fabric surrounding them is unforgiving, and Anna makes the painful choice to leave her husband for Vronsky, inviting scandal and scrutiny from a society that prizes propriety above all.

Anna seeks a divorce through family channels, enlisting her brother’s help, while Karenin—under the corrosive influence of Countess Lydia Ivanovna, Fiona Shaw—refuses to grant it and denies her access to Seriozha. The loss of her son compounds Anna’s despair, and she spirals into depression, turning to laudanum as a quiet, private escape. In the wake of these trials, she bears another child with Vronsky, yet the couple remains pulled between a passionate love and the weight of societal judgment that tempts them to pursue a more conventional life apart from the scandal.

Haunted by fear of losing Vronsky to a more respectable marriage, Anna grows increasingly unsettled and suspicious. She believes the relationship may be doomed to fail as society’s gaze grows harsher. Driven by despair, she makes a drastic decision and goes to the railway station, where she takes her own life by leaping in front of a moving train, an act that sends shockwaves through everyone who loved and feared for her.

Vronsky’s grief over Anna’s death leaves him shaken and searching for meaning. He volunteers for a dangerous mission in the Balkan War, a bid to prove his courage and salvage some sense of purpose. At a train station in the midst of this turmoil, he encounters Levin, Alfred Molina, a man who has already seen life’s complexities through a quieter, steadier path. Levin has married the woman who once captured Vronsky’s own heart—Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya, Mia Kirshner—a union that unsettles both men as they navigate love, loss, and responsibility.

Levin’s encounter with Vronsky becomes a moment of sober reflection. He urges a reconsideration of life’s value and the endurance that comes from fidelity and family, even as the two men confront the looming possibility that happiness might come from different choices. The conversation lingers, offering a counterpoint to Anna’s impetuous romance and to a life shaped by public opinion rather than private truth. When the moment passes, Levin returns home to his family, continuing a quiet, stubborn search for meaning. He documents the events that have unfolded, and in a final, almost defiant gesture, signs his manuscript with the name “Leo Tolstoy,” a subtle assertion of art’s power to bear witness to human turmoil and resilience.