Thank you for the review (and please forgive the typos I'm going to make etc). Russians have a compulsive need to both boast of their Holmes - and at the same time demand incessantly new and new confirmations of its greatness, always remaining a little bit unsure about it, so I have read quite a few of westerners' opinions, solicited and not.
Yours is good, it's thorough, and it documents some of the emotional (mis)readings, the ones that so rarely align across cultures.
I myself am a Russian, a Moscowite, who spend 15 years living (or, rather, programming, no one in his right mind should mistake one for the other) in the US. While being far from England and its culture, this perverse experience still gives me some glimpse of the Anglo-Saxon ways, well, if one is permitted to think of US as a sort of bastardised culture, quite English in its core. The laws (or what passes for the law there) is one example, the attitude towards trade, ideas of what a house should look like and so on.
So the first feeling upon reading your review was a sort of perverse satisfaction, you complained of the same things I tried to complain in ru_sherlockiana (to the total and expected ignorance on the part of its citizenry): that pastiche of Sir Henry gone wild, vulgarity of Mrs Barrimore (quite out of the permitted range for a victorian servant), sand-colored hair and mousy appearance of a "striking" South-American "brunette" (this one you charitably missed), and the excesses of the life in the "humble abode" where food is served the way only (I presume) upper classes of that time could enjoy.
Well, this is not England (or Europe), but what Europe is imagined to be by the Russians, and probably this piece of imagination could tell you why "European" lifestyle remained so enticing for generations and generations: who would miss the kind of life in which people forced by their mutual lack of money to share an apartment, change daily their fashionable clothes, have wonderful galleries leading into their bedrooms and breakfast each morning in that unhurried and gentlemanly upper-class style. Living for a few of years in the West forces a Russian to reackquaint himself with the realities of the Western life, and so many become as harsh critics of your ways as previously they were of their own.
But that was an aside. Apart from this most obvious reading, your review also displayed a more interesting plane of meanings, that is how you perceived actions and emotions of the actors (obviously very much Russian and directed to the Russian audience), and whether you read or misread them.
I will pass a couple of your (indigenously English) putdowns that mix praise in the first half of the sentence with rather heavyish bathos in the second (to site an example, an English politician remembered Stalin's translator's opinion about Georgians, a snippet that became very visible in the Russian political blogs a few days ago: "This is no place for a white man" - he said in his impeccable North London accent (he could do American with equal success)).
So let's see how the reading of the film differs between you and me (takins us as generic cases):
"It is this sort of humour that works best in the Russian production – one of the funniest scenes being Watson overseeing Sir Henry's attempts to dress in the English style."
Really?? - and I do not even remember the scene!
And here come the two major omissions. For Russians the most wonderful character of the whole Russian series is not Livanov as Holmes (I would fully share your reservations, although he does have his fans in large numbers, I admit) - nope, it's our WATSON. You were right noting that all modern interpretations have to "colour" in an attempt to introduce some originality into a so well-known and overdone story. The point the Russian producers tried in this case was IRONY. No single character is portrayed earnestly, each one is a sort of slapstick on its own, and intentionally so.
Now, different actors in different parts managed this task not even with different degrees of success, but on vastly different scales, and that is where "instability" was built into the production.
reviewing the reviewer ;)))))))))))
Yours is good, it's thorough, and it documents some of the emotional (mis)readings, the ones that so rarely align across cultures.
I myself am a Russian, a Moscowite, who spend 15 years living (or, rather, programming, no one in his right mind should mistake one for the other) in the US. While being far from England and its culture, this perverse experience still gives me some glimpse of the Anglo-Saxon ways, well, if one is permitted to think of US as a sort of bastardised culture, quite English in its core. The laws (or what passes for the law there) is one example, the attitude towards trade, ideas of what a house should look like and so on.
So the first feeling upon reading your review was a sort of perverse satisfaction, you complained of the same things I tried to complain in
Well, this is not England (or Europe), but what Europe is imagined to be by the Russians, and probably this piece of imagination could tell you why "European" lifestyle remained so enticing for generations and generations: who would miss the kind of life in which people forced by their mutual lack of money to share an apartment, change daily their fashionable clothes, have wonderful galleries leading into their bedrooms and breakfast each morning in that unhurried and gentlemanly upper-class style.
Living for a few of years in the West forces a Russian to reackquaint himself with the realities of the Western life, and so many become as harsh critics of your ways as previously they were of their own.
But that was an aside. Apart from this most obvious reading, your review also displayed a more interesting plane of meanings, that is how you perceived actions and emotions of the actors (obviously very much Russian and directed to the Russian audience), and whether you read or misread them.
I will pass a couple of your (indigenously English) putdowns that mix praise in the first half of the sentence with rather heavyish bathos in the second (to site an example, an English politician remembered Stalin's translator's opinion about Georgians, a snippet that became very visible in the Russian political blogs a few days ago: "This is no place for a white man" - he said in his impeccable North London accent (he could do American with equal success)).
So let's see how the reading of the film differs between you and me (takins us as generic cases):
"It is this sort of humour that works best in the Russian production – one of the funniest scenes being Watson overseeing Sir Henry's attempts to dress in the English style."
Really?? - and I do not even remember the scene!
And here come the two major omissions. For Russians the most wonderful character of the whole Russian series is not Livanov as Holmes (I would fully share your reservations, although he does have his fans in large numbers, I admit) - nope, it's our WATSON.
You were right noting that all modern interpretations have to "colour" in an attempt to introduce some originality into a so well-known and overdone story. The point the Russian producers tried in this case was IRONY. No single character is portrayed earnestly, each one is a sort of slapstick on its own, and intentionally so.
Now, different actors in different parts managed this task not even with different degrees of success, but on vastly different scales, and that is where "instability" was built into the production.