As per Sarik Andreasyan, Pushkin's language is "unmanageable for the modern ear". I guess this is the key to understanding why the movie is so extremely boring and ... strange, putting it lightly. No, it is obvious that Pushkin can only appear "unmanageable" for a D student, who later became a mediocre director (with a very specific talent of scooping up government's money though), and who is still holding grievance to the author he was forced to learn at school. As Pushkin's language still sounds surprisingly modern, being ultimately succinct and vivid (taking into consideration Russian's millennials obsession with their "koroche" - that is condensed speech).
Dictum-factum, Sarik got rid of the most of the poetry (although Vdovichenko is reading some verses in a strange jack-in-the-box style), but he did not replace it with action, with emotions, with characters evolution and revolutions, with what we love and expect from a good movie. No, he is mercilessly (and very slowly) dragging you through the distorted and strangled story (by the way, Zaretsky is not an evil trickster here, it's all Onegin's fault), sometimes literally freezing the action.
So, first time I could not finish watching this pretentious and tedious mockery - the mockery of not even the novel, which the author didn't bother reading - but the 1999 adaptation. I still manage to force myself to watch the rest of the movie (for the sake of Pushkin's heritage, as we are not likely to see a new adaptation in the next 25 years), taking often tea breaks, which is obviously the only way to bear this torture.
All in all, don't waste your precious life on this dead thing; "Onegin" 1999 shines like unattainable jewels retroactively.
