Word: chekhovisms
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...GULL by Anton Chekhov...
...Chekhov's insistence that his plays were funny simply proves that the best of dramatists may be the worst of guides. The mainsprings of The Sea Gull's plot hardly elicit laughter. The jaded Trigorin (Christopher Walken), a fashionable author of about 35, is sensually drawn to Nina (Kathryn Bowling), an innocent 18-year-old. Watching Nina cradle a freshly killed sea gull, Trigorin jots down a writer's note: "An idea for a short story. A young girl has lived in a house on the shore of a lake since childhood, a young girl like...
...Uncle Vanya cries out for intimacy. There are, as always, intense forces at work beneath Chekhov's relatively placid surface, but here they are not as sweeping as in his other plays: no armies come and go, no property is sold, no affairs are consummated, no duels fought, no suicides committed--indeed, it is Vanya's pathetic and half-hearted attempt at melodramatic action that points up the universal failure to act at the heart of the play. These are Chekhov's weariest and most resigned characters, and they are dying before our eyes. Watching them it is easy...
...excerpts from their longer works still seem satisfyingly self-contained. Roth describes himself as a child with "one foot in col lege, the other in the Catskills," and the Borscht Belt routine is what his first-person narrators constantly imitate, no matter how much they want to sound like Chekhov or Henry James. Elkin's characters are prone to bursts of speechmaking, and their creator is also fond of the short set piece. Here is a Cadillac that has been sitting in the heat too long: "Whatever was plastic in the car . . . had begun to bubble, boil, the glue...
Indeed, the people of The Seagull are pretty much the same as those in Ordinary People, mutatis mutandis. Redford, though, is not Chekhov. The purpose of art of this sort is to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary--this he has failed to do. He brings little in the way of creativity or technical resources to his film, only a lot of self-conscious artiness which he takes to its furthest extremes, directorial touches which never coalesce. It all starts with the opening credits, white letters on black background, no sound: "Oh, Christ," you think--"not another American Bergman...