Richly detailed, large scope period drama. Doomed, damaging romance. Joe Wright certainly knows his way around both of those topics and he’s brought them crashing together again for his Tom Stoppard-scripted version of Leo Tolstoy’s epic tale of passion, betrayal, aristocracy and revolution, Anna Karenina. Take a look at the first full trailer for the film below.
Keira Knightley is Anna, an aristocrat in late 19th century Russia, unhappily married to the honourable but stodgy Alexei Karenin (Jude Law). She’s suddenly enraptured with a new, powerful love, Count Vronsky (Aaron Johnson), who offers her everything she doesn’t get with Alexei. But he could also be the source of her undoing, because gossip spreads quickly and betrayal is not met with kindness…
In addition to the trailer, the poster is also online, via Glamour Magazine. You can check it out in the gallery below. With the likes of Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Emily Watson, Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Holliday Grainger and Olivia Williams also among the laden cast, Anna Karenina looks set to bother the awards season, even if it’s just for costume and set design - the whole thing is conceived as a stage show in a deliberately artificial world, and it looks ravishing. It’ll remain to be seen how the performances are received, but we’ll know when the film arrives on September 7.