(1999) Too late, too late. "If you but knew the flames that burn in me….When will the devil take me?" Six years pass before Evgeny Onegin (Ralph Fiennes) returns to St Petersburg - invited to a ball at the yellow palace of his cousin Prince Nikitin (Martin Donovan), he's reintroduced to Tatyana (Liv Tyler) - after having left the country estate his uncle had left to him as inheritance.

There, where he'd gone after sophisticated society and its courtesans had become tiresome, initially on the distasteful duty of attending to a relation's dying request, he arrives too late; his uncle is dead. There, while making acquaintance with the traditions and people of the countryside, he meets Vladimir Lensky (Toby Stephens), a provincial romantic poet, who remains in this rural backwater for love of his muse, Olga Larin (Lena Headey).

Lensky introduces Onegin to the Larins, in addition to Olga, the widowed mother and another sister, Tatyana. Regal in stature with dark, tragical tresses, pretty blue eyes and pouty red lips in a face too big for its charming features, the actress and the picture, faithfully adapting Alexander Pushkin's great Russian novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, with its Byronic protagonist, directed by Martha Fiennes (with Ralph as executive producer and other Fiennes family members involved in its creation) occasionally - as in the ice-skating scene - achieve a high, poetic quality of cinematic beauty but otherwise fail to engage fully sympathies for the lethargic characters.

Onegin upsets some of his neighbors with his radical politics by saying he intends to let his serfs rent his lands, a view, which attracts Tatyana's interest (Why should one person become another's property by accident of birth?), he admits is more a result of his indolence than any idealistic passion.

She writes him a letter, expressing with the candor and naiveté of an innocent, impressionable girl, her ardor for him. Motivated by ennui, he arrives late when invited to a celebration of her name day and tells her in private, apologizing for arousing her romantic imagination, when she asks why he does not return her feelings: "I cannot." Further, he warns her: "I have no secret longing to be saved from myself."

Dancing with Olga, Onegin ignites a flame of jealousy in Lensky's breast (already smoldering from an earlier disagreement from which the poet realized Onegin's having contempt for his neighbors, save none), which he further inflames by casually insulting Olga's honor in calling her "easy."

Lensky challenges Onegin to a duel, for which his foe's tardy appearance with a manservant (rather than a gentleman) as second implies his failure to appreciate the gravity of the occasion. "Is this necessary?" asks Onegin, to which Lensky answers there can be no reconciliation.

Unseen by the duelists, Tatyana witnesses the event; later in St Petersburg her elderly cousin, a matron of social stature, derides the girl's desire to marry for love: "Love is a luxury … you cannot afford."

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