The Lady with the Dog.(Staff Recommendations: Cineaste Editors Tout Their Favorite Recent DVD Releases)(Brief article)(Video recording review)

Cineaste, June, 2009 by Menashe, Louis

This release of Iosif Heifitz's 1960 film, based on one of Chekhov's--and world literature's--greatest short stories, had me nostalgic. No, I never had a holiday affair with a young married woman in Yalta, but I do remember welcoming the cluster of films of the post-Stalinist cultural "Thaw" that brought humanism to Soviet screens.

Heifitz (1905-1995) didn't belong to the younger pioneering generation (Chukhrai, Konchalovsky, Tarkovsky, et al.), but his old-fashioned, straight, and unadorned adaptation of Chekhov's tale is one of the standouts of the period, with its pitch-perfect gray "Chekhovian" tonality enveloping a sad love story that has no resolution. (For a later souped-up version, see Nikita Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes, 1987.) The irresolute lovers are...

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