Take a freewheeling adaptation of some of Anton Chekhov's short stories, a Soviet director - Nikita Mikhalkov - who revels in affectionate portrayals of pre-revolutionary Russia, and Italy's great international star Marcello Mastroianni and the result is Dark Eyes (Ocio Ciornie), the unqualified hit of this May's fortieth Cannes Film Festival.
It is easy to see why the festival jury's decision to give the Best Actor prize to Mastroianni was roundly acclaimed in a year when the audience responded with hostility to a number of other awards. Mastroianni played an aging, charming, thoroughly irresponsible idler who provokes a very genuine, deep passion from a proper Russian matron.
Always a remarkable actor, with age Mastroianni seems, if possible, to be getting even better. The film is recounted by a shabby, aged Mastroianni whom we find on board a ship at the turn of the century. He introduces himself to a kindly Russian passenger and begins to tell his story with a charming irony.
Rich Background
The film moves into flashback, and we see Mastroianni as Romano, an Italian architect living in Russia, married to rich aristocrat Elisa (Silvana Mangano), who had fallen in love with him when he was a poor student and who still defends him against her disapproving family.
Romano has the habit of fleeing abroad to one spa or another - for reasons of health he claims - but the trips usually coincide with problems he does not want to face. Once at the spa he always manages to charm some attractive woman also taking the waters. He has run away to one such spa after Elisa has told him that the family bank is at the point of closing.
Here he meets Anna (Elenal Sofonova), a lady with a dog; her character is nicely adapted from Chekhov's famous short story, The Lady with a Dog. Anna is a shy woman, very different from the other women so ready to cede to his charms. She falls deeply in love, and is so frightened of the depth of her feeling that she flees back to Russia and her husband, a provincial governor (played by the famous Soviet actor Innokeni Smoktunovsky).
Romano pursues Anna to Russia, and the film takes a turn toward farce as he must pass himself off as a glass manufacturer in order to get the proper travel documents. Improvising and bluffing, he finally gets to Anna's town for a brief reunion amid the broad comedy of gypsy bands, innumerable toasts in vodka, and enough mistaken identities for a Feydeau farce.
Fervently promising to marry her, Romano returns to Italy only to discover that his wife is truly bankrupt and has been forced to sell their house. He never returns to Russia, although he does see Anna one last time.
In two earlier films, Slave of Love and Oblimov, director Mikhalkov has shown how wonderfully he can recreate a lost time with a quite perfect sense for period detail, which infuses his work with a kind of haunting nostalgia. Dark Eyes is beautifully photographed by Franco Di Giacomo.
Nikita Mikhalkov comes very much from the
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