Word: sonya
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hughes) returns to the family estate with his young wife Elena (Julie Christie). The visit is a catalytic agent that exposes the alternately tragic and comic tensions of unrequited loves and lives. The caustically self-pitying Uncle Vanya (Nicol Williamson), who has worked the estate along with his niece Sonya (Elizabeth Wilson), realizes that he has sacrificed his life in the service of a pompous academic fraud. The mute adoration he offers Elena bores and annoys...
...Scott) yearns for a Russia that would not brutalize its peasants and ravish its land, but disillusion has sunk him in drink. He too falls half in love with Elena, and she with him, but she is too indolent and conventional to make an erotic leap to freedom. Poor Sonya loves Astrov-a futile, heartbreaking hope that exists only to be dashed. When Vanya learns that Serebryakov proposes to sell the estate, he goes staggeringly blind with rage and fires two revolver shots at the professor, missing both times-the ultimate, humiliating proof of his ineffectualness. The visitors depart. Sonya...
...Astrov, is a bit too much the Russian bear for my taste. Astrov's passions are too often expressed by the tremor of voice and moistness of eye that Omar Sharif made infamous in Dr. Zhivago. But he can be subtle when necessary as in his scenes with Sonya, in which he delicately and deftly refuses her offer of love...
...highest praise goes to Irina Kupchenko's Sonya. I remember at my first viewing of the film feeling that this Sonya was too young and pretty to be Chekhov's Sonya: I envisioned a cowish sort of girl--hardworking, trusting, basically provincial and unstimulating. The Sonya in the film is so captivating that I couldn't imagine why Astrov did not immediately fall in love with...
...second time through, however, this reading made perfect sense to me. In fact, it creates the most poignant moments in the film. Because Sonya is so lovely, Astrov's rejection of her is all the more telling. He admits himself that it is too late for him: he is too coarsened, too disillusioned. A relationship with a young girl would be absurd at this point. The pure sensuality of an affair with Yelena is more apropos of his desires and his capacity to act. Meanwhile, Sonya will fade away in the country, and it is her tragedy--the tragedy...