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February 22, 2002, The New York Times
MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE CHERRY ORCHARD'
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Mr. Bates's Gaev is a pitch-perfect,
deeply sad portrait of habitual passivity masking panic...
 CHEKHOV'S
"Cherry Orchard" portrays as stingingly as any work
of literature how patterns of family wealth often play out in
the modern world. With devastating delicacy, it illustrates the
principle of deceleration by which the idle rich allow inherited
privilege to trickle through their fingers until they suddenly
find themselves the idle dispossessed. In this Darwinian cycle
of having and losing, the self-made nouveaux riches are panting
to step into their shoes. One contemporary maxim that could be
gleaned from the play is the adage to "stay hungry."
 The work's languid, mopey aristocrats,
who fail to muster the will to retain possession or even to profit
handsomely from their debt-ridden estate with its beloved cherry
orchard, are so narcotized by a life of torpor that they can't
lift a finger to save themselves. It's easier to procrastinate
and exist in a state of denial (to use today's favorite catch-all
word for a refusal to face reality) until the ax (literally)
falls. When Chekhov completed "The Cherry Orchard"
in 1904, he was dying, and the play, which he labeled a comedy,
could be viewed as a final chortle of recognition at the vanity
of human wishes and the ultimate absurdity of human endeavor
in the shadow of mortality.
Bittersweet meditation
Michael
Cacoyannis's moving but imperfect screen adaptation of the play
takes the traditional tack of softening the comedy and making
"The Cherry Orchard" a sobering social parable and
a bittersweet meditation on the high cost of self- delusion.
What laughter it offers is of the sort that catches in your throat.
Without seriously distorting the
play, the 79-year-old director, best known for "Zorba the
Greek," has taken it even more outdoors. As the aristocrats
amble around a property that will soon be auctioned off, the
immensity of nature underscores the triviality and evasiveness
of their nervous chitchat.
 The film also gives the story
a prologue in which its central character, Lyubov Ranevskaya
(Charlotte Rampling), is fetched back home from Paris. Five years
earlier, after the drowning of her son, she fled Russia for France,
where she took a lover whom she allowed to squander much of her
fortune.
The pacing of the film is stately,
the cinematography (by Aris Stavrou) devoid of flashy effects,
the spacious country house in which the characters fritter away
their lives is on the brink of decay. In true Chekhovian spirit,
the characters seem to have one ear cocked for sounds in the
distance, as though they were listening for history itself to
send them signals of what the purpose of their lives might be
and how to proceed.
What makes this "Cherry Orchard"
different from almost every other interpretation (and makes it
essential viewing for lovers of Chekhov) is Ms. Rampling's extraordinarily
rich portrait of Ranevskaya, who runs the estate with her ineffectual
brother, Gaev (Alan Bates). In Ms. Rampling's hands, a character
typically depicted as a grand, dithering ninny isn't as foolish
as she's often made out to be.
A steely
smile playing at the corners of her mouth, her eyes glinting
with a covert self-awareness, Ms. Rampling's Ranevskaya projects
the psychological acuity of someone painfully aware of her own
character flaws, yet stubbornly set in her self- defeating ways.
A deeply paradoxical woman, she is one step away from being what
we would call a control freak, yet she still ultimately loses
control.
And when that loss comes, she
seems perversely relieved to surrender what she loves most as
though it were a punishment she knows she deserves.
What makes the performance so
compelling, even dangerous, is the uncomfortable human truth
it uncovers.
For if we look into our hearts,
most of us can remember moments when life overwhelmed us and
we froze and watched in secret shame as fate took its course
while we stood by immobilized. Knowing full well what we should
have done, we still couldn't bestir ourselves to act and chose
instead to throw up our hands and put on a show of helplessness
and victimization.
RANEVSKAYA'S crucial counterbalance in the play
is Lopakhin (Owen Teale), the wheeler-dealer son of serfs, who
became wealthy enough to end up purchasing the estate on which
his forerunners toiled as slaves. In the movie, Mr. Teale's Lopakhin
isn't the boorish, stomping conquistador frequently seen onstage.
Although the actor gives the character's roaring moment of triumph
its due, his Lopakhin isn't enough of a barbarian at the gates
to convey the shock of reality the play can deliver.
But even the intrepidly aggressive
Lopakhin has his moment to freeze. It comes when he finds himself
unable to propose to Ranevskaya's adopted daughter, Varya (Katrin
Cartlidge).
 Most
of the movie's performances benefit from the intimacy of the
camera's close-up scrutiny. Mr. Bates's Gaev is a pitch-perfect,
deeply sad portrait of habitual passivity masking panic,
and Ms. Cartlidge's Varya is a taut bowstring of frustrated anticipation.
Of all the play's characters,
the most sadly self-deluded may be Feers (beautifully played
by Michael Gough), the family's loyal, tottering old butler who
rues the day Russia liberated its serfs and who ends up literally
abandoned by the family in its hasty departure. Andrew Howard
as the intellectually arrogant but impoverished eternal student
Trofimov (who tutored Ranevskaya's son) gives a darkly funny
portrait of a brain feeding on itself.
Certain subplots are questionably
handled. Because Tushka Bergen seems too old for the role of
Ranevskaya's daughter, Anya, the chemistry of her romance with
Trofimov feels wrong.
As hindsight has revealed, the
half-heard signals that the play's characters strain to decipher
in the distance were intimations of the Russian Revolution soon
to come. And in light of subsequent events, "The Cherry
Orchard" stands as a stark reflection of the way history
has shaped the character of the Russian people.
Habitually pacified by centuries
of czarist rule, the souls of these grownup children pine for
the guidance of an authoritarian parent. As we now know, that
parent eventually materialized brandishing a hammer and sickle.
THE CHERRY ORCHARD
Produced and directed by Michael Cacoyannis; written
by Mr. Cacoyannis, based on the play by Anton Chekhov; director
of photography, Aris Stavrou; edited by Mr. Cacoyannis and Takis
Hadzis; music by Tchaikovsky, performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy;
production designer, Dionysis Fotopoulos; released by Kino International.
Running time: 137 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Charlotte Rampling (Lyubov Ranevskaya), Alan
Bates (Gaev), Katrin Cartlidge (Varya), Owen Teale (Lopakhin),
Michael Gough (Feers), Tushka Bergen (Anya), Xander Berkeley
(Epihodov), Gerald Butler (Yasha) and Andrew Howard (Trofimov).
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February 17, 2002, The New York Times
CHEKHOVIAN ANGST AMONG REAL TREES
By PETER MARKS
"You have to guard against
indulgence,"
Mr. Bates said of Chekhov during a recent conversation ...
"It's got to do with behaving, being.
You've got to feel absolutely one with your part.
You have to try not to perform, but to be."
ONE of the things Michael Cacoyannis missed most
in stage productions of "The Cherry Orchard" was the
cherry orchard. Its fate is at the heartrending core of Chekhov's
masterpiece. But an indoor set usually does little more than
provide the barest representation of the trees that fall under
the ax of the bourgeois speculator who buys the estate out from
under the deluded, land-poor heroine, Madame Ranevskaya.
 So
when Mr. Cacoyannis - the Greek theater and film director who
found cinematic success in 1964 with "Zorba the Greek"
- decided to take on the tricky job of turning the play into
a movie, he made the orchard a centerpiece. Indeed, the first
film he shot, a whole year before casting, was of an amble through
the cherry trees from the camera's point of view, the branches
slapping against the lens. The images had such power for him
that he used them in the opening sequence of his "Cherry
Orchard," a film starring Charlotte Rampling and Alan Bates
that is to have its American premiere on Friday in Manhattan.
"What limits this on the
stage is the absence of the orchard," the 79-year-old Mr.
Cacoyannis declared in a telephone interview from Athens. "To
me, the presence of it was so important. My God, don't you think
that Chekhov would love a film where nature invades the play
so fully?"
Chekhov might have been happy
that there was any film at all. When one ponders all the second-rate
theater regularly recycled for the multiplex, it is astonishing
that only now, 98 years after the play was first performed in
Moscow, can filmgoers watch a full-blown version in English of
Chekhov's sublime work. Then again, considering how tough it
has proved to translate Chekhov to the screen, perhaps the surprise
is that Mr. Cacoyannis managed to pull off any sort of celluloid
"Cherry Orchard."
While another dramatist for the
ages - the one who came from Stratford-upon-Avon 400 years ago
and churned out Elizabethan hits - continually gets major motion-picture
treatment (and even occasionally does well at the box office),
Chekhov's plays are rarely transferred to film, at least in the
United States or Britain. And successful ones are even rarer.
That has something to do with a perception that unlike Shakespeare's
plays, Chekhov's character-driven work is not inherently cinematic
- that, as Mr. Cacoyannis described it, "people find him
boring, because nothing happens."
Even onstage, Chekhov is a daunting
assignment. His plays are set in venerable country houses inhabited
by passels of complex characters bound by blood or pain: anguished
doctors, tormented students, clownish teachers and disappointed
daughters who talk on and on about their frozen lives and dashed
hopes and unattainable dreams. Their predicaments are often tragic
and funny at the same time. In the wrong hands, the wry humor
undercutting the sadness is lost, and all the tension melts away,
leaving a stagnant puddle.
Guard against indulgence
"You
have to guard against indulgence," Mr. Bates said of Chekhov
during a recent conversation over dinner in Manhattan, where
he is rehearsing a play being readied for Broadway, "Fortune's
Fool," by another 19th-century Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev.
"It's got to do with behaving, being. You've got to feel
absolutely one with your part. You have to try not to perform,
but to be."
 When
Chekhov does make it to the screen, the outcome is often airless,
a theater piece with cameras added. That was pretty much the
story with Laurence Olivier's "Three Sisters" in 1970:
It was, in fact, essentially a play on ilm, well-received in
the stage version Olivier had directed for the National Theater
in London with Joan Plowright, Derek Jacobi and Mr. Bates, but
static on the screen.
Sidney Lumet tried his hand two
years earlier, with a star-studded adaptation of Chekhov's "Sea
Gull": the cast included Simone Signoret, James Mason, Vanessa
Redgrave, David Warner and Denholm Elliott. The movie is a turgid
ordeal. "Most of the performances are excellent," Vincent
Canby wrote in The New York Times, "but all of the actors
seem to be on their own." The film, he said, "makes
too literal the boredom and quiet despair that should hang over
the Chekhovian characters like an unseen mist."
Expansive Framework
STUDENTS of Chekhov say that movie treatments go
awry not because Chekhov does not belong on film but because
inward-looking directors and actors fail to grasp the author's
expansive framework, his fascination with social upheaval, with
science and nature - the worlds exploding just outside those
suffocating country houses.
"They don't see the larger
scope," said Carol Rocamora, who teaches theater in the
Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and is a Chekhov
translator; her play based on the love letters of Chekhov and
his wife, the actress Olga Knipper, "I Take Your Hand in
Mine," was performed in London last year by Paul Scofield
and Irene Worth. "They see Uncle Vanya sitting around the
samovar, but they don't see the widening concentric circles around
that samovar, like the forest where the peasants are lurking,
and beyond."
Occasionally, a filmmaker finds
his way to a Chekhovian essence. "Vanya on 42nd Street,"
a spare, modern-day version of "Uncle Vanya" adapted
by David Mamet and
directed for the screen by Louis Malle, was an art house hit
in 1994. Praised by some reviewers for its unmannered visual
eloquence, the movie cannily uses actors in street clothes to
elucidate Chekhov's universal themes. Still, for period Chekhov,
it is Russian filmmakers who seem most adept. The most vibrant
realization of his work, many Chekhov lovers say, is "An
Unfinished Piece for Player Piano," the 1977 movie by the
Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov, who also directed "A
Slave of Love" and "Burnt by the Sun." (Many of
Chekhov's plays and short stories have been adapted again and
again over the years by Russian and other European filmmakers.)
"An Unfinished Piece,"
based on Chekhov's "Platonov," an early, uncompleted
play, revolves around a high minded schoolteacher who must face
the reality of his banal life. It is set on one of those requisite
rural estates, yet the house is unlike the stultifying manses
of other Chekhov movies. It brims with the vitality of performances
of exquisite shading. The actors, many of whom were household
names in Russia, possess a quality that Mr. Bates identifies
as so crucial to Chekhov, the ability to transcend artifice and
simply be.
"It certainly debunked all
my stereotypical ideas about Chekhov," said Charles Newell,
the artistic director of the Court Theater in Chicago, which
last year produced the American premiere of "Piano,"
an adaptation by Trevor Griffiths based, oddly enough, on Mikhalkov's
film of Chekhov's play. What Mr. Newell loved in the movie was
"the humanity, the aliveness, the complexity; how extreme
the behavior was, but how authentic."
Achieving that apparently required
an unorthodox approach. "The story is that Mikhalkov put
all the actors in a dacha for months and left them there to rehearse
by themselves," Mr. Newell said. The idea was to allow all
the accumulated tension and emotion to sink in, and then to let
the cameras take advantage of what had naturally evolved.
 For his "Cherry Orchard,"
Mr. Cacoyannis could not go to such extremes. Budgeted at just
$5 million, the movie was made in Bulgaria in eight weeks early
in 1999. "I was so careful to get the right cast, but also
to find the right house," the director said. Ms. Rampling
is Ranevskaya; Mr. Bates is her brother, Gaev; the Welsh actor
Owen Teale is the businessman, Lopakhin, and Michael Gough plays
the aged servant, Feers. The house he chose was a hunting lodge
on the grounds of the former king of Bulgaria's summer palace
outside Sofia.
Mr. Cacoyannis had been contemplating
a movie of the play for decades; he had written a screenplay
for it in the 60's, in which he had added a few scenes of his
own devising, including an early scene in Paris, where Ranevskaya
has been living, and one in an auction house, as the property
is being sold. The director's friend, the playwright Terrence
McNally, asked him a few years ago what had become of the script.
"I fished the manuscript out, and that was it," Mr.
Cacoyannis said.
Still, though the movie has been
seen across Europe - the most enthusiastic receptions, he reported,
came in Greece and Russia - the route to an American release
was a bumpy one. After it was shown at the Montreal World Film
Festival in 1999, the director was sure a distributor would step
forward. "I expected Americans to stretch out their hands,"
Mr. Cacoyannis recalled, "but they were all a bit frightened.
They feel there's no place for art films."
Despite the obstacles, "The
Cherry Orchard" will by no means be the last attempt to
get Chekhov right on the screen. At the moment, Robin Fontaine,
a theater-trained director, is in San Francisco, editing her
digital film based on "The Sea Gull." With the working
title of "The Sea Gull Project," it is Chekhov updated
to present-day California. And set, of course, in one of those
great houses in the country.
"What I was really interested
in was that Chekhov could be fresh and immediate and right now,"
Ms. Fontaine said. "People talk about it being 19th-century
Russia, but I think it's simply about people who fail to connect,
people who don't understand why they can't get any traction in
their lives, why they're spinning their wheels." |||
Self-delusion, inertia trap
family in lush 'Cherry Orchard'
By Misha Berson
Seattle Times staff critic
There are some fresh revelations
in the two central performances. Bates gives Gayev a surprising
range of emotions: imperious anger, playfulness, shrugging bemusement
and raw grief. And Rampling is like an exquisite piece of delicate
porcelain, which endures yet always seems on the verge of smashing
to pieces.
A GROVE of cherry trees, bursting with heavy white-pink
blossoms, so lush and profuse you can almost smell the air they
perfume.
That is the opening image of the
new Michael Cacoyannis version of Anton Chekhov's masterful 1904
play, "The Cherry Orchard." And throughout this moody,
beautifully composed and acted movie, filmed in Bulgaria and
first released in 1999, the camera's languorous gaze returns
to the trees over and over - in wondrous bloom, in autumn leaf
and denuded by winter.
Onstage, the highly symbolic orchard
of the play's title can only be suggested.
But by setting his film on a grand
but decaying estate, and lingering on shots of its lush grounds
and groves, 79-year old Cacoyannis (best known for his film "Zorba
the Greek") vividly conjures what is at stake in this tragicomedy.
Those trees represent what the fading Russian gentry love most
dearly and what will slip through their gloved fingers.
Recently acclaimed for her performance
as a widow in denial in François Ozon's "Under the
Sand," Charlotte Rampling is equally superb here as Madame
Ranyevskaya, another fragile, narcissistic woman trapped in a
gauzy veil of inertia and self-delusion.
Having barely survived the death
of a son, and a financially ruinous affair with a faithless lover,
Ranyevskaya returns to her family estate to find it mired in
debt and about to be auctioned off - unless she and her brother
Gayev, portrayed with a canny blend of old-boy charm and irresponsibility
by Alan Bates, can wake up and smell the cherry blossoms.
Of course, they can't: If they
could, they wouldn't be Chekhov people. Though Lopakhin (Owen
Teale), a self-made businessman and son of serfs, urges them
to subdivide the property for vacation homes, Ranyevskaya and
Gayev cannot abide such a vulgarity.
So they stay trapped in the gentility,
privilege and indolence of their class - in passive revolt against
the rapidly changing Russia exemplified by Lopakhin and by the
idealistic student Trofimov (Andrew Howard).
This inability to cope with reality
also paralyzes their dependents: Ranyevskaya's lovely daughter
Anya (Tushka Bergen) and dutiful foster daughter Varya (played
with bottled-up fury by Katrin Cartlidge), Anya's eccentric governess
Charlotte (Frances de la Tour) and the decrepit family butler
Feers (Michael Gough).
As these figures drift through
the impressive but gloomy mansion, and step out into the dazzling
sunlight, Cacoyannis adeptly conveys a sense of time both rushing
by and standing still.
His is a fairly standard reading
of the drama, sometimes overmisted in elegiac melancholy. But
the film is scrupulously acted (in English), visually perfected
and skillfully complemented with Tchaikovsky piano music.
And there are some fresh revelations
in the two central performances. Bates gives Gayev a surprising
range of emotions: imperious anger, playfulness, shrugging bemusement
and raw grief.
And Rampling is like an exquisite
piece of delicate porcelain, which endures yet always seems on
the verge of smashing to pieces.
When she and Gayev first hear
the crack of an ax against one of her beloved trees, their anguish
is almost unbearable. You know they are fools. Yet you can't
help feel for them, and for the natural world that will suffer
for their impotency. |||
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