Dark eyes

National Review, Nov 6, 1987 by John Simon

Dark Eyes

THE RUSSIAN director Nikita Mikhalkov and the Italian star Marcello Mastroianni have been gravitating toward each other for years. Mikhalkov, who adores Fellini's 8 1/2 and resees it before he starts shooting any film, perceived the actor as the archetypal Italian lover and Fellini exponent. The actor, who saw Mikhalkov's Slave of Love, Oblomov, and Unfinished Piece for Player Piano (from Chekhov's Platonov), loved the atmosphere of not so much dolce as bittersweet far niente in those films, even as Mikhalkov is drawn to Western freedom of expression and lavishness. And so, as Hardy says in "The Convergence of the Twain,' about the Titanic and the fatal iceberg, "consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.' In the movie Dark Eyes, watered-down Chekhov meets freeze-dried Fellini in an encounter that should jar both East and West.

It is a film of great opulence even in its locations--Italian spas, gardens, villas, Russian villages, churches, palaces, land- and townscapes--shot with eye-dilating, very nearly cloying beauty by Franco di Giacomo. No expense was spared by the production designers, Mario Garabuglia and Alexander Adabachian (one of the scenarists-- beware of movies co-scripted by designers), the costumer Carlo Diappi, and, above all, the producer, Silvia d'Amico Bendico. She is the daughter of Suso Cecchi d'Amico--with Mikhalkov, the third co-scenarist--and one of Italy's most prolific screenwriters. But two hours of ravishing vistas and luxurious interiors cannot make up for that smidgen of intellectual and emotional authenticity nowhere to be found.

Even the film's title is a piece of vulgarity, deriving as it does from the best known and trashiest Russian song, which, moreover, is totally irrelevant here: Elena Sofonova, who plays the heroine, has grey eyes. To accommodate both Mikhalkov's and Mastroianni's fortes, something Russo-Italian had to be concocted. Four Chekhov stories, notably "The Lady with the Lapdog,' were dimly drawn on, but mostly it is the three scenarists improvising in what they claim to be the Chekhovian manner. Actually, it is quite un-Chekhovian and utterly unmannerly.

The frame story has a rather slovenly, dilapidated Italian telling his life to a Russian passenger in the dining room of a ship sailing from Greece to Italy. Romano, the narrator, was a modest student of architecture when he married Elisa, an heiress who soon came into her fortune, which made Romano give up all work, to turn into a party clown, a Lothario, a hedonistic lazybones, who, when things get hairy at home, goes off to a spa. At a big party in his house, Romano eludes Elisa (Silvana Mangano), who has just learned that the family fortune may be lost, and a frolicsome mistress (Marthe Keller) to take a siesta. Pursued by the women, he packs himself off to a spa near Pisa, where, after one casual dalliance, he starts another with Anna, an unhappily married young Russian--the lady with the lapdog. Upset by their affair, the innocent Anna escapes to her distant province, leaving behind a passionate letter.

Back home, the letter haunts Romano, who journeys to Russia on the pretext of building a factory there, and manages to overcome bureaucratic opposition to a travel permit. (This is clumsy pseudo-Gogol.) He makes it to Anna's provincial town, where, after some ludicrous contretemps, the pair embrace again in a barn and resolve to marry, but Romano must first (improbably) trek back alone to secure a divorce in Italy--at that time! Confronted with Elisa, he loses his nerve and remains stuck. However, without our being told why and how, he finally left Elisa and has become, we learn, a waiter on this ship. His Russian interlocutor now summarizes his story: how, after years of persistent wooing, he managed to persuade an unhappy woman who doesn't love him to marry him. They're on their honeymoon, and she's about to join him and Romano. She is, of course, the woman with the grey--sorry, dark --eyes and we end on a closeup on her, looking not a day or a care older.

To turn Chekhov into O. Henry is bad enough. Chekhov's stories are not tied into neat little packages; rather, they end on ironies, uncertainties, aporias. Further, they are painted with quick little strokes of a dry brush: a wrenching detail here, a teasing wisp of conversation there. Mikhalkov & Co., however, go in for sprawl, lush exoticism, and lots of sight gags (Romano pretending that the mere Russian word sabatchka, lapdog, uttered by Anna cures his allegedly suffering legs). How would Chekhov, for whom Stanislavsky was too much, have taken to Mikhalkov?

The Italians are seen as decadent Westerners; the Russians are either slightly less decadent aristocrats or good creatures from the lower orders, including an ecologically concerned veterinarian who is a crushing, gatecrashing bore. Their convivial carousals are much nicer excesses than the Italians' sexual cavortings and balneary hysterics. The scenes at the spa, by the way, doubtless intended as an hommage to 8 1/2, emerge as rather too rich for Marat/Sade, what with elderly patients racing about in wheelchairs as if in bumper cars or wallowing in mud baths like Disneyfied pigs, not to mention mealtime with a mountainous soprano yodeling a Rossini aria. Pauline Kael has rightly pointed out Mikhalkov's bungling of details: when Anna fingerpaints a line on the wall with her tears, the design does not evaporate; when a glycerine tear bejewels the corner of Anna's eye, it never rolls off. Not much better is a chorus of happily warbling gypsies riding past Romano's carriage, to be followed by his mother's voice singing a childhood lullaby on the soundtrack as saffron dawn breaks over the tundra. How life-affirming is a three-ring circus?