Word: vanya
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CENTRAL CINEMA II Uncle Vanya, 6, 9:30. Lady With The Dog, 8, Wknd...
...lives of these people: the self-centered professor, who has been writing about art for 25 years "without knowing anything about art:" Yelena, his completely provocative and utterly directionless young wife: Sonya, his fresh, intelligent young daughter, stuck in the country for the rest of her days; Vanya himself, who could have been "a Dostoevsky or a Schopenhauer" if not for 25 years of "stupid, dirty provincial life;" and Dr. Astrov, who despite his intelligence and energy will sink--with the help of the vodka bottle--into Vanya's vulgarity and hopelessness after another 10 years...
...THAT the movie is uniformly gray. Chekhov intended his plays to be comedy of a sort, and the comic moments are not lost in the film. Vanya's senile mother reads her pamphlets on the emancipation of women and smokes cigarettes (which seems to encompass her idea of emancipation). Astrov gives a stirring rendition of the weather report when Vanya interrupts his seduction of Irina--an example of the Chekhovian principle that the words we exchange in conversation don't mean a damn thing. And Vanya, the prototype useless intellectual, constantly brings a smile of recognition with his temper tantrums...
...acting in this film is marvelous, particularly Innokenty Smoktunosky's Vanya. His petulant spats with his maman, his grandiose pretensions, his weepy self-pity; the sarcastic facial expressions alone are phenomenal. Sergei Bondarchuk, as Dr. 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...
...about the Civil War (featuring the noble peasants and workers led by some selfless fellow curiously resembling Lenin) that they've even lost their sense of camp for me. But the day of such films is clearly past. The understanding, subtlety and just plain good taste with which Uncle Vanya has been produced is clear evidence of and high tribute to the rising quality of Soviet films...