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THE CHERRY ORCHARD Send This Review to a Friend
Michael Cacoyannis, the esteemed Greek director who is known for his "Zorba the Greek" and numerous other films, has approached Anton Chekhov's classic play with a mixture of reverence and creativity in adapting it for the screen. Determined not to merely make it a stage-to-screen transfer, he has added touches of his own, yet geared them to bringing out the essence of the drama instead of turning the adaptation into the sort of dumbed-down revisionist nonsense like that of one staged version that made the play a rollicking comedy.
Cacoyannis captures the sadness and upheaval involving the fading away of one part of society to make room for change. But given the opportunity of film to open up a work, he begins in Paris where Tushka Bergen as Anya has come to take her mother, Charlotte Rampling as Madame Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya back to Russia, where she had lived before her move to France after the tragic drowning of her son. The opening fills us in on what has happened to her and that helps set the stage for the action back at the family estate in Russia.
The director has struck gold in his casting. Rampling, a brilliant actress whose performance in last year's "Under the Sand" should have had an Oscar nomination, is superb in bringing out her character's desperate attempt to salvage her life and property and maintain the dignity of her position. The immensely gifted Alan Bates as her brother Gaev adds immeasurably to the portrait of a family trapped by financial pressure and helpless to stem the tide that is overtaking it. Another emotionally affecting performance is that of Michael Gough as the elderly butler Feers, who has been with the family for years and is to be left pitifully alone. I can't say that I cared much for the brassy, overbearing performance by Frances De La Tour as the governess Charlotta, who likes to perform her boring magic tricks.
The rest of the casting, including that of Owen Teale as Lopakhin, the former serf who, now a self-made businessman, eyes the orchard as a site for a new housing development, adds convincingly to the ensemble effect. Cocoyannis, who wrote the adaptation, pays careful attention to other aspects that help build the overall impact--the production design by Dionysis Fotopoulos, the cinematography by Aris Stavrou, and the music by Tchaikovsky. The film could have sufficed with one stroke of an ax into a tree in the orchard to symbolize the destruction; we don't have to see the trees actually falling. But criticizing a bit of excess is a quibble with an otherwise impressive and worthy screen interpretation. A Kino International release.
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