Whether this movie is based on, inspired by or just bears a passing resemblance to Chekhov's The Lady With The Little Dog is ultimately academic because what really matters is the movie as it stands, is it good, bad or ho-hum. It's actually rather good if anybody asks you. Sure, there are things that verge on hat of the very oldest kind, like the O'Henryish ending but the film transcends stuff like that easily. It begins with our old friend the Frame narrator buttonholing a passenger on a small cruise ship and laying his life-story on him. The information ladled out by the passenger - despite advancing years he is newly married; he had loved and pursued his wife for years; she in turn was unhappily married and could never love him but finally consented to marry him - over the length of the film is done so cunningly that only the professional film/story analyst will even sense a connection between this and the story told by Marcello Mastroianni, architect manque, married to Miss Gotrocks in the shape of Silvana Mangana, who is seized without warning by a passion for a Russian woman encountered by chance, so much so that he pursues her to her homeland and perseveres in the face of a burocray not unlike that encountered by Melvyn Douglas in HIS attempt to be reunited with Ninotchka, until he is finally able to travel to her small home town. The style is a hybrid of Chekhovian spareness and Visconti opulence but even this seems appropriate for a film determined to charm and seduce the discriminating viewer. Does it succeed? What do you think.
Review of Oci ciornie
