Grand but Idle in Old Russia, a State of Denial
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

THE NEW YORK TIMES MOVIE REVIEW
February 22, 2002

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.

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.

Translating a Masterpiece
By KENNETH TURAN