The Karamazov’s— a gender bender film now streaming on most major VOD platforms— is not your grandmother’s Dostoyevsky...
Or maybe it is?
Russian-born cinematographer Tatiana Stolpovskaya especially had reason to fret about just how much or how little grandmothers— and hers in particular— would see in this film’s playful adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.
For starts, consider that there is only one brother Karamazov. The others are sisters, one of which is queer-identified. And that’s just the beginning of the playful change-ups from a feminist perspective we find in this take down of patriarchy
Stolpovskaya recounts, “… I was the most nervous before our Russian premier at Stanislavsky Electrotheater. We had a Zoom Q&A and I was preparing myself to defend our choices. There were many strong interpretations of the novel before us, both in theater and in film…
…I think what helped us is that we are totally different and we didn’t claim to tell the whole story. We focused on a few themes and remapped them to modern times. Dostoevsky’s world is pretty dark and the audience mentioned that our film has light and hopeful—which is needed nowadays.
The audience was excited to see that there is a cross-cultural dialogue and still an interest in Russian literature.
The day after the screening, my grandmother, who worked in publishing all her life, called to say she was not bothered by the character's gender switch and that she recognized each sibling and their personality. Huge relief and inspiration!..”
Here, Picture This Post (PTP) talks with both Russian-born cinematographer Tatiana Stolpovskaya (TS) and American-born Filmmaker and Theatrical Director Anna Brenner (AB) about their unique take on Dostoyevsky’s work and the challenge of making it resonate with our time—first on stage and then in film.
(PTP) What first grabbed you about Dostoyevsky’s novel for both the stage and later for this film?
(AB) In high school, I started a Russian literature club but I was the only consistent member and we mainly read Tolstoy. I read The Brothers Karamazov outside of school in my 20s. My own father had died recently and, although he didn’t resemble Fyodor (the Karamazov patriarch) much at all, I have two brothers and I related to the characteristics and relationship dynamics the siblings had in the novel.
The novel is so rich and complex. There are so many paths one could focus on while adapting it. I felt like I could happily devote myself to working on this material for the rest of my life and there would still be more to explore. But while adapting, I also had to stop treating it like a holy object and allow myself to play around with the material and what it inspired in me.
I worked at a classical Off-Broadway theater in NYC and produced a Dostoevsky Fest where we did a number of readings of Dostoevsky adaptations and had interesting panels and discussions. We did a staged reading of a straightforward adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov that I think had a 14-person cast … and only two women.
As I was interested in both the classics and experimental theater, I wanted to find a way to work with this material but distill it, reframe it, make it more contemporary—and find a way to express the more intangible, emotional and spiritual qualities that were lost in a lot of traditional adaptations.
For the play, I chose to use live-feed video to get close with the characters' emotions, projections and dance, which helped the audience feel and experience the story beyond just dialogue. And I chose not to have the Fyodor character on stage but to be given voice by the under acknowledged caretaker character.
(TS) In Russian school we read the Boys chapter in 7th grade. In 10th grade you have a choice between The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. I picked the latter one because the title sounded to me like one of Tarantino’s films, which I was binge watching at that time. I had to catch up on reading after we started pre-production.
All I was thinking was “Dostoevsky is not a good script writer. Not enough action, too many characters and yet where are all the women? Will have to rewrite all of this …”
(PTP) And how did it unfold that the original theatrical work evolved into this film?
(TS) I came to document a workshop for Karamazov’s theater performance and met Anna and the full cast as they were rehearsing.
Anna picked Dostoevsky and made it queer. I filmed the rehearsal and decided, “I’m not leaving.”
Live feed camera was a part of the theatrical performance and actors already had experience interacting with it. When we got together for filming, it felt like the work never stopped. The actors picked up the relationship with the camera immediately.
(AB) A lot of things that were exciting and which worked in the theatrical production had to be reimagined or dropped or told visually instead of through dialogue. While adapting it to a screenplay, I was really thinking about the house and the locations where it would be filmed. And considering how those external elements would symbolically add layers to the story and ground it in a new way that we didn’t have with the theater production.
The actors helped create these characters and contributed to the script throughout development, so they brought a lot of emotional and psychological depth to the roles, which allowed us a lot of freedom to play while filming. We could capture their reactions and expressions and use those micro-gestures to express things that in the play might have to be said or expressed in a different way.
After Tatiana first met me and the cast, I remember us all hanging out and talking late into the night in the kitchen at the artist’s residency that housed us. She brought amazing energy and presence to the group. We all started dreaming about how to bring her into the creative development process. We all instantly connected around our shared interests, experience and sensibilities.
Tatiana, Yana (our editor) and I were a tight team and worked together intensively from pre-production through post-postproduction. Because I was adapting it from the play, they were really a big part of translating the story visually to film. We worked pretty quickly in pre-production, sharing inspiration images, storyboarding and location scouting. Because of Tatiana’s experience as a documentary filmmaker, she was always flexible during filming and worked quickly.
We never forced anything but we responded while filming and made new discoveries as we went.
The screenplay was definitely a living document that made a huge shift during the editing. I think the first cut was over two-and-a-half hours long. It underwent many revisions, cuts and restructuring. I added some voice over, shot a few pickups and went back to the island for more B-roll. Yana really helped shape the story. She would go off on her own for a few weeks to edit another pass, then we’d come together and work intensively to find the story together.
Throughout post, Tatiana joined us a few times to share her impressions on the edit too. Together, we decided to add character intros at the top of the movie and used footage we shot long ago for the play, which were these really cool black and white portraits, and we mixed them with personal photos the actors shared that eerily evoked the characters they played.
Yana and I printed stills of all the scenes and taped them up on my wall. We kept rearranging things and trying to find the emotional arc of the piece. When we filmed, the weather was really crazy and hard for continuity, so we ended up using that—a snowstorm one day, clear and sunny the next—to symbolically express the character’s inner worlds and to disorient the viewer to the narrator’s unreliable experience of telling this painful memory.
(TS) When a huge snowstorm hit Martha’s Vineyard midway through production, we were struggling to keep continuity. Most of the story unfolds within two days. At some point, our AD, Rafael, was melting snow with a flamethrower torch for Dimitri’s arrival scene.
...The next day the whole island was covered in three feet of snow. Dostoevsky was sending a signal. We reshot one scene and decided to be playful with our timeline.
(PTP) The original source material, Dostoyevsky’s novel, is devoid of playfulness. In contrast, Karamazovs has oases of humor. How and why did you realize that artistic choice?
(AB) In the novel, there is a symbolic moment where Dmitri does this very dramatic bow to his father, so we were playing with that. Throughout the movie, we edited some of these big plot points and emotional events through jump cuts and repetition to highlight how memory and trauma can lead to unreliable narration. It also brought some humor and lightness, which are qualities present in the novel.
I think we need some humor to settle us in before we can access some of the more painful memories and traumas.
In the theatrical production, we never had anyone playing Fyodor Karamazov. Instead, Liz (our narrator and his caretaker, a character inspired by Smerdyakov in the novel) walked around with a microphone and when Fyodor would speak, she would bark into the microphone! He loomed large but we never gave him the status of a real human. This highlighted how each of the siblings was haunted by him and it centered on Liz who had always been overlooked by the family.
This experimental idea carried over into the script for the film, where we have his voice and we cast an actor to represent him but he is never fully present in a conventional way. They are retelling their story and he haunts everyone—while alive and even after his death.
(TS) The text we were working with is very philosophical and within one's self. Long dialogues can work on stage, but you can’t make a film out of it. At least one that people would watch. So adaptation and a playful approach were crucial. As a cinematographer, I come from a documentary background. I love observational camera and the theatrical cast had already been developing characters for many years. It’s liberating not to be too rigid with the genre. A comical scene can turn into drama, followed by a memoir or a murder mystery.
When I learned that we were not planning to show the main character, Fyodor, I was psyched. One less actor to light! But seriously, it was one of the strongest motivations for camera work, to block scenes during which we never see the father to leave it to the imagination. It can be any patriarch … Even you one day.
(PTP) What do you want viewers to take away from this film treatment of the novel—both within and outside of LGBTQA circles?
(AB) I hope they see the film and it opens up questions for them about the relationships they have and what they love and live for. What do you need to feel alive and free? How are we interconnected despite our differences?
The movie asks if we can hold the darkness and the light.
I hope audiences might look at their own lives and consider what needs to be addressed with compassion and understanding so they can love life and not participate in continuing cycles of harm."
Editor’s Note: For more information visit The Karamazovs website and/or follow the film on Instagram at #the.karamazovs.
Image courtesy of The Karamazovs.
