The Cherry Orchard

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...