Il gabbiano

I wish I could have taken a course on Russian Playwrights when I was in college, that way I could have some insight into Chekhov's psyche. Absent that, I will do my best with "The Seagull", one of Chekhov's most famous plays. As I said in the heading, it is about relationships, and peculiar in that everyone involved loves someone else. Without going into dizzying detail, this labyrinthine nature of the plot requires concentration, in the absence of a scorecard.

The overall mood of the play is gloom and despair, as though love casts a pall over the proceedings. It is 1904, at a Russian mountain resort. Without going into painful detail (just read the website's storyline), there are at least four unhappy couples with their hearts in pain, and the main star is Annette Bening, who gives a terrific performance as an aging actress trying to stay young. Elisabeth Moss is a name I am unfamiliar with but she was excellent as a woman desperately in love with Bening's son (Billy Howle, out of his element here), who is in love with Saoirse Ronan. I'll stop here before it becomes confusing.

All in all, the film is handsomely mounted and, as far as I can tell, faithful to the material. I wish I could have generated more feeling for the principals involved, but I grew restless waiting for an impactful scene.

Haven't seen any of the stage or screen versions of the classic Anton Chekhov play, so I have nothing to compare this film to. With its very strong cast, I did think the drama offered enough to keep me engaged throughout, although I didn't feel a powerful connection to its characters for the most part.

The interplay of the emotions and passions of its characters played out at a rather posh lakeside summer home in Russia, at the turn of the 20th century, appealed to me because I don't mind dialogue driven films and I wasn't expecting any kind of action flick. Overall, the movie is not perfect but there was enough here for me to be worth the watch.

This film tells the story of an entangled web of loving feelings in an estate in 19th Century Russia.

I really like the two leading actresses, but they still are unable to save the film from being incredibly slow and dull. I really wanted to like it, but I was bored out of my mind.

I thought of that line from Sunset Boulevard several times this afternoon as I sat, the only person in the theater for a 2:50 matinee, watching this *Seagull*. Not that the script, based on Chekhov's play of the same name, was negligible. To the contrary. It was well delivered by a cast who, for the most part, knew how to do so with telling effect.

But what struck me, over and over, were all the close-ups of the faces. Wonderful faces, characterful faces, belonging to actors young and older who never knew the silent screen era and yet know how to act just with their faces. Faces often perfectly lit, so that we saw the fresh beauty of the young - Saoirse Ronan, as Nina, out on the lake with Boris Trigorin and elsewhere in the early parts of the movie - and the cruel wrinkles and crowsfeet of those to whom time has not always been kind (Annette Bening, as the aging actress Irina, who delivered her dialogue wonderfully, but did so much more with her face alone when she considered, at the odd moment, that she might in fact no longer look appealing to her younger lover, Trigorin). If you like to watch actors act with their faces, as Norma Desmond and her generation knew how to do, you will find this movie a feast for the eyes.

But it is also beautifully filmed. The exteriors were evidently shot up in northern New York State, and they are like landscape paintings. The interiors, with period costumes, are wonderfully shot as well.

But it is the performances that you will remember. In addition to those already mentioned, Brian Dennehy, now 80 years old, is winning as the aging Sorin. Billy Howle does a fine job with the young playwright Konstantin, so convinced that he sees a new way to do theater and yet so very wrong. I was less captivated by the Doctor and Boris Trigorin. Elisabeth Moss had a difficult assignment, because Masha is such an unsympathetic character, particularly self-centered in a story about self-centered people.

Another thing that struck me repeatedly as I watched this movie was how cruel most of the characters are to each other, in their own very decorous ways, mostly because they are so wrapped up in themselves that they do not consider those around them. Well before Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet, *The Seagull* is definitely an example of the theater of cruelty.

Because this was released in the summer, it will, I suppose, be forgotten by Oscar time. More's the pity. There is a lot of very good work here, in the acting, the lighting, the cinematography and the direction. This is definitely a movie that could be savored more than once.

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I subsequently reread the play, in Laurence Senelick's 2006 translation. I was surprised to see how much of the script is taken verbatim from that. The person who did the fine screen adaptation removed references to things that contemporary audiences would not know, shifted locales for certain episodes to produce the sort of visual variety you can't have in a play but need in a modern movie, and trimmed back certain passages so that subsequent events, such as Nina's appearance at the estate near the end of the movie, come as more of a surprise. Other than that, this movie is a remarkably faithful transfer to the screen of Chehkov's play.

Now I realize that The Seagull is a play by Anton Chekov. However, I dont think it translated well onto screen or perhaps the director didnt translate it well onto screen. Just some of the dialogue and the way the actors delivered their lines didnt feel very natural. Like it felt at times that I was watching a play rather than a film. In film you can be more subtle and nuanced rather than on stage where you have to play for the person in the back row. I think the only person who really stood out to me was Elisabeth Moss who played Masha. And I love Saoirse Ronan but for me it just seemed like such a odd choice to cast her since she had to put on an American accent to play a Russian in the setting of Russia.

Story wise it was ok. Very heavy handed with the symbolism. Which again, might be better suited in the play. For me, it picks up more in the second act. I think one of the more powerful moments is when Nina returns and speaks to Konstantin and the somewhat ambiguous ending.

The costumes are beautiful as well the settings. It can be a pretty film to watch. But overall, I dont think this film really added anything new that I couldnt get out of seeing the show live. It was good but nothing you have to immediately run out and see either.