The Lady With the Dog (1960, Iosif Kheifits) (Patreon)

72/100

Second viewing (last seen 2003), no change. Adapting Chekhov’s plays for the screen is plenty daunting enough, and those are 95% dialogue; that Kheifits* succeeds in conveying the ineffable essence of this particular short story qualifies as a small miracle. Ace casting does much of the work: Aleksey Balatov (who’d previously starred in Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying) reveals by excruciating degrees the inner life of a man who achieves his callous, selfish aim, only to then be surprised and disarmed by emotions too powerful to shrug off; Iya Savvina, plucked from obscurity to play one of literature’s most celebrated figures, remains a magnificent oscillating whatsit, looking and sounding for all the world as if she might crack into a hundred pieces and spill to the floor at any moment. A few crucial moments don’t really translate in the absence of interior monologues—we get no clear sense, for instance, of why Dmitri lurks outside Anna’s house for a while before retreating—but that’s counterbalanced to some degree by the way that the Moscow stretch becomes a jarring caesura during which it’s unclear (in a productive way) why this tale, which seems to have unhappily resolved, stubbornly persists in our field of vision. (We also get cutting divertissements like Dmitri's wealthy pal preventing a waiter from eavesdropping by throwing forks for him to retrieve.) Chekhov’s ending, of course, is famously unresolved, and I’d forgotten the dazzling means by which Kheifits pulls that off visually, closing with a shot of Anna swallowed up by the barely penetrable darkness of her apartment building, her form a shadow, her window a distant point of light. Hard to articulate the power of that cut, which is unquestionably assisted by Nadezhda Simonyan’s stirring score but also depends on the shot’s shift in scale from Anna’s POV of Dmitri standing below and her prior close-up, plus the peculiar architecture of the building itself (which has Anna’s window sort of pinned between two massive walls, creating even more of a sliver effect). “Damn good film. Not quite sure why I loved it, though,” I was thinking a mere 15 seconds before it ended. Then: “Oh, right.” 

* Whichever method of Cyrillic romanization produced Heifitz—which is what everyone called him when I logged this last—has apparently fallen into disfavor over the past two decades. Though Jascha Heifetz appears to be set in stone.