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The Cherry Orchard

1999, Movie, NR, 137 mins

The Cherry Orchard: Review

Michael Cacoyannis's overblown, underwhelming screen adaptation of one of Anton Chekhov's greatest plays opens in 1900 with a brand new — and entirely unnecessary — prologue which finds Madame Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya (Charlotte Rampling) broke and living in a squalid Paris garret. It's been five years since the accidental drowning of her beloved son and Madame's subsequent flight from Russia with the no-good lover who later ran off with her money and another woman. Madame's daughter, Anya (Tushka Bergen), arrives to escort her mother back home, but things are no better for her in Russia. The emancipation of serfs some forty years earlier created a more equal society, but also spelled an uncertain future for the aristocracy. Former peasants like Lopakhin (Owen Teale) are now rich merchants and landowners, while old world aristocrats like Madame and her bachelor brother, Gaev (Alan Bates), find themselves on the brink of ruin: It's all Madame's elder daughter, Varya (Katrin Carlidge), can do to keep their skeleton staff fed. Lopakhin urges Madame to sell off her expansive cherry orchard to a developer who plans to chop down the trees and build summer villas for vacationing parvenus; with the money from the sale, she and Gaev can continue to live comfortably on the family estate. But Madame is unable to adapt to the changing times: The cherry orchard represents not only the old world that's gone for good, but also her own youth. She refuses to sell off her beloved orchard, and risks losing everything. As thrilling as they can be on stage, Chekhov's plays have never been the stuff of great movies — there's simply nothing cinematic about them. Most of the real action occurs offstage — a dramatic strategy for which Chekhov was famous — and attempts to open up the plays risk dissipating the quiet, extraordinary power of the performances. It's no coincidence that the most successful adaptation of a Chekhov play is probably Louis Malle's VANYA ON 42nd STREET, a straightforward, unadorned reading of Uncle Vanya on a bare Broadway stage. The irony is that this film's cast is uniformly superb; their performances could have — should have — been allowed to stand on their own. leave a comment --Ken Fox