CastleDrama: War and Peace (2016)

In case you haven't noticed by my latest posts yet, I'm totally in Russian mode right now. After "Russian Ark" I simply couldn't get enough of the splendour that was the Romanov empire - and so I spent my Easter Monday starting to watch BBC's adaptation of "War and Peace" (again). Plus, I also listened to the magnificence that are Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Khachaturian and Rachmaninov. Sorry Mr. Frenchman in "Russian Ark", not only Germans are great composers!

Back to BBC's "War and Peace": I had already watched the first episode a few weeks ago but I needed a while to get over the fact that the characters didn't look the way I imagined them to due to the 2007 adaptation. However, I started again on Easter Monday and quickly made my way through all six episodes. For the most part, I quickly got over my quibbles with the casting and enjoyed many of the actors equally or more than their 2007 counterparts. While it's still a difficult task considering that she is not yet a real teenager at the beginning of Tolstoy's epic, I enjoyed that they at least tried to age the character of Natasha Rostova played by Lily James visually throughout the series. Unfortunately, not the same can be said about Clémence Poésy's Natasha (though I might have still liked Poésy better in the role overall).

As I've said in the previous post, I haven't yet read Tolstoy's novel and so I can't say much about how true an adaptation stays to the original. I did enjoy (admittedly to different degrees) some interesting plot twists I didn't see coming towards the end of the series though I'm not going to spoil them for anyone who hasn't watched either or both of the adaptations. As I cannot say which one is more truthful to the original, I'm simply going to enjoy all adaptations as I'm sure I won't as much as soon as I have read the book. The philosophy of the human spirit and endurance that Tolstoy's book is all about can hardly be translated onto the screen anyway.