The Lady with the Dog

viewed July 16, 2000 on VHS   Full Details

Chekov's "The Lady with the Dog" is arguably my favorite short story.  With incredible attention to the details of and changes in natural surroundings and human states of being, the story follows a cynical and depressed Russian aristocrat through the blossoming stages of an unexpectedly life-affirming extramarital affair.  It is a miracle of a story, at once beautiful and brutally honest, using the gift of prose to challenge one's values and sense of complacency; to make us feel that what would be a moral violation is an act of humanity in a society that is mechanically cold.  

I was excited when I learned of a film version, one by the Russians no less.  This one, made back in 1960, was fun to watch if only because I knew what would happen at each turn; it literally goes by-the-book.  Gradually, the fun of watching wore out as I realized how little the film offered to enrich the story, though there is admittedly very little one can do to improve a story that is already perfect.  The most notable change made is a tonal one at the conclusion that is utterly depressing and untrue to the spirit of Chekov's story.

It does a fine job of validating the wholesomeness of the illicit affair, rivaling the ability of Hollywood movies to twist conventional values.  Most effective in this effort is Iya Savvina playing the lady Anna Sergeyovna.  She is pure and beautiful, and seems to evoke the metaphysical hollowness felt by the characters of Antonioni films.  Indeed, the film seems uncannily akin to those being made all over Western Europe, somber metaphysical films by Bergman, Antonioni and Fellini that interrogated, in rather bleak fashion, the meaning of both the individual and his place in society.  

However, the ending here seems so downright melancholy that there is no chance that this love will last.  The note sounded is many times more despairing than in Chekov's final litany of words; it seems the filmmakers are giving the affair up for what it is; merely an affair, a fleeting grasp at happiness in a foreboding world.  It doesn't succeed in Chekov's delicate balancing act of motivations: it emphasizes too much the emptiness of their lives so that their love isn’t so much valuable in and of itself but rather as an escape from their dreary day-to-day lives.  Also Dmitri’s character undergoes less of a transformation than in the story.  There is little in this film's flat black-and-white imagery to evoke the magnificent descriptions of the surroundings in Chekov's prose.  The opening scenes in the resort at Yalta are despairingly grey and flat -- in the story, the beauty of this bourgeois getaway was partly responsible for inspiring love between Dmitri and Anna.  The movie's sterile scenery does not reflect an emerging appreciation of life's beauty in Dmitri's heart, while his own vanity gives way to human kindness.  The movie only hints at this gradual process of change. 

Perhaps the film was more a reflection of its own times than of Chekov's, and in that regard it should be given some credit.  I would have preferred a lusher, warmer film that focuses more on what I think was Chekov's vision: the realization that there are beautiful things in the world worth caring and feeling for, in spite of the harshness of mundane life, rather than this postwar metaphysical depressant.

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