Among the baker’s dozen of dazzlers appearing in WAG’s December “Bedazzled” issue, few are more scintillating than Keira Knightley, titular star of Joe Wright’s boldly stylized “Anna Karenina.” Has there ever been a woman to wear pearls, diamonds and pearls with diamonds more ravishingly (courtesy of Chanel, whose Coco fragrance Knightley reps)? Not to mention hats with patterned veils and ball gowns with yards of black, white and burgundy velvet, satin and lace. No wonder Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s dashing Vronsky is so bewitched.
This is not to suggest that artifice is all there is to this “Anna,” set in a Russian theater, because all the world’s a stage, you know. Rather, it’s artifice in service of art, as Knightley, Taylor-Johnson and Jude Law (as Anna’s sympathetically stuffy hubby) make lucid the very inexplicability of love. – Georgette Gouveia