The Lady With the Dog

Anton Chekov's classic short story, recently the inspiration for 1987's fine Italian film Dark Eyes, was originally filmed in its native land by Josef Heifits in 1959. Scrupulously faithful to the source material, this adaptation tells of a middle-class Russian's love for a younger woman, whom he meets while vacationing at Yalta. Alexei Batalov stars as Dmitri and Iya Savvina is Anna, the two principals who are both married--yet find themselves drawn to one another. While not a film that modern audiences will immediately respond to, The Lady With the Dog excels in its superb psychological portrait of adultery--Anna burns with guilt and shame, while Dmitri, who originally was just having a fling finds himself in love and desperate to figure out a solution that will allow him to continue his respectable family existence while maintaining his relationship with his mistress. It is the age-old quandary of wanting to eat one's cake and have it too--bound by emotional bonds that neither can break, the two lovers do not sail off into the romantic sunset, but clutch each other in a painful realization of the hell that the future promises to bring them. Recommended. (R. Pitman)