The Cherry Orchard
Greece/Cyprus/France 1998
Reviewed by David Jays
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
The turn of the last century. Lyubov Ranevskaya lives in Paris, and has recently been left by her sponging lover. Five years earlier, she fled her family estate in Russia after her husband and young son died in quick succession. Now her daughter Anya fetches her home.
Ranevskaya is reunited with her brother Gaev and adopted daughter Varya. Habitual visitors include Trofimov, the dead boy's tutor, and Lopahin, a merchant whose father worked the estate as a serf. He urges the family to save the heavily mortgaged estate by chopping down their cherry orchard and selling the land for holiday cottages, but they dismiss his suggestion. Meanwhile Ranevskaya's lover sends telegrams begging her to return. Anya and Trofimov fall in love; Lopahin repeatedly postpones proposing to Varya.
Spring becomes autumn, still without a decision. Ranevskaya holds a ball as the estate is auctioned, and a drunken Lopahin arrives, announcing he is the new owner. As autumn ends, the family scatters - Ranevskaya to Paris, Gaev to work in a bank. Lopahin again fails to propose to Varya. The family leaves as the first axe strikes in the orchard.
Review
The limpid fluidity of Chekhov's plays, flecked with curious detail, seems to invite cinematic treatment. Ironically, Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street, confined to the rehearsal room, is perhaps the most successful film of a Chekhov play. In this initially effective treatment of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Michael Cacoyannis, a prologue establishes Ranevskaya's miserable Parisian existence at the top of a cramped and peeling apartment block. Opening up the play is relatively painless - the characters are consumed by pointless activity, so the camera simply follows them around. This cunningly decentres the house as we wander through the backstairs shambles, following Varya supervising the household or maundering old Feers carrying bundles of linen.
The first hour intrigues with its restlessness - no one can settle, and the soundtrack is full of clatter and squeaky boots. Everything is fluid, unfixed: as Ranevskaya returns home, her dove-grey skirt laps the steps, her fur coat slides from her shoulders. Fractured in three by his shaving mirror, her brother Gaev talks nonsense. Even when the action is confined to a single room, the camera bobs and sways, index of a world in flux.
The orchard itself is no mere backdrop, but a defining presence. In spring it becomes an impressionist blur of white blossom, bathed in such bright light that dazzled visitors lose their way. In the summer twilight, amid clusters of scarlet fruit, people wander dislocated, uncertain of their direction. This landscape alters dramatically with the seasons and by autumn has become a bleached vista of leafless trees, white sky and dark mud. Cacoyannis also gives the orchard some of the bewildering forest menace of Russian fairy tale.
Cacoyannis has often turned to theatrical texts for his films - notably, his Euripides trilogy of Electra (1961), The Trojan Women (1971) and Iphigenia (1976), featuring the tragic grandeur of Irene Papas. Here he explores hapless disengagement, tragedy gathering between myriad acts of self-absorption. His actors continually avoid eye contact with each other, and although the dialogue is closely followed, there is little conversation, merely sotto voce soliloquies or eccentric expressions of fixed ideas. Virginia Woolf said once of The Cherry Orchard's giddying emotional range that it made her feel, "like a piano played upon at last... all over the keyboard and with the lid left open." The actors reach easily for extremes of tears or laughter, but Chekhov also has an existential quirkiness which only Frances de la Tour's governess captures here. Imperiously batty, she maintains a disconcertingly unimpressed exterior. Only dolls hear her muddled confessions and even they receive alternate blows and caresses that distil a lifetime of lonely singularity. It is hard to avoid intimations of modernity in The Cherry Orchard, especially as cinema, the medium of the century, is the play's contemporary. Cacoyannis provides a train hurtling past silver birches, those enduring props of Russian drama. Even more insistent are revolutionary premonitions, with hungry peasants lurking in the orchard. Although Cacoyannis never elides the family's irresponsibility, he also shivers with a class on the verge of dissolution.
As the film proceeds, it becomes progressively slower. Although Chekhov insisted he had written a comedy, it has often been dunked in nostalgia. Cacoyannis too is tempted - for instance in the family's farewell to hushed peasants, particularly the picturesque old and young, while a Russian choir hymns soulfully in the background, like the sorrowing soul of the orchard itself. Otherwise, one of the film's most effective aspects is its Tchaikovsky soundtrack of neurasthenic regret. The piano always sounds as if it is in the next room, the phantom music of memory. Whenever anyone absently plunks at the on-screen keyboard, it is jarringly out of tune, adding to the sense that the dark house, with its flaking varnish and picture frames, is a mausoleum of tarnished memories. In the final scenes, we hear cawing ravens and the dry thud of axe blows. The camera wobbles in sympathy with the trees, and finally swims away. Ultimately the film's interest is in a moment of apprehensive instability, rather than a fondly remembered past or shining future.
Credits
- Director
- Michael Cacoyannis
- Producer
- Michael Cacoyannis
- Screenplay
- Michael Cacoyannis
- Based on the play by
- Anton Chekhov
- Director of Photography
- Aris Stavrou
- Editors
- Michael Cacoyannis
- Takis Hadzis
- Production Designer
- Dionysis Fotopoulos
- Music
- P.I. Tchaikovsky
- ©none
- Production Companies
- a Melanda Films production in association with The Greek Film Centre/Amanda Productions/Films de l'Astre with the participation of Canal+
- Eurimages Counsel of Europe
- Executive Producers
- Yannoulla Wakefield
- Alexander Metodiev
- Production Supervisor
- Pat Arvaniti
- Director of Production
- French Crew:
- Jean-Pierre Desagnat
- Location Managers
- Radoslava Todorova
- Vladimir Vladimirov
- French Crew:
- Ludovic Henry
- Production Liaison
- Bobby Rangelov
- Assistant Director
- Guy Travers
- Script Supervisor
- Krassimira Karachorova
- Casting
- Bruce H. Newberg
- Slater & Associates
- Los Angeles Associate:
- Tim Michals
- London Associates:
- Claudie Layton
- Belinda Norcliffe
- Orchard Photography
- Nikos Kavoukidis
- Steadicam
- Christo Bakalov
- Lettering
- Argyris Vavour
- Set Architect
- Lili Pezanou
- Set Decorator
- Ivan Andreyev
- Costume Supervisor
- Jane Hamilton
- Wardrobe
- Mistresses:
- Katerina Karaivanova
- Katia Ivanova
- French Crew:
- Justine Duprat
- Make-up/Hair Design
- Joan Hills
- Titles/Opticals
- M. Sacadakis
- P. Papadimitriou
- Music Played by
- Vladimir Ashkenazy
- Recording Producer
- Andrew Cornall
- Recording Engineer
- Martin Atkinson
- Music Consultant
- Dimitri Papadimitriou
- Soundtrack
- "String Quartet No 3" by P.I. Tchaikovsky, performed by Chamber Orchestra Kremlin, Misha Rachlevsky
- Dance Arrangements
- Fedya Lobanov
- Sound Recordist
- Alexander Bachvarov
- Sound Transfers
- Thanassis Arvanitis
- Re-recording Mixer
- Costa Varibopiotis
- Sound Editor
- Leslie Wiggins
- Cast
- Charlotte Rampling
- Lyubov Andreyevna (Ranevskaya)
- Alan Bates
- Gaev (Leonid Andreyevich)
- Katrin Cartlidge
- Varya (Varvara Mihailovna)
- Owen Teale
- Lopahin (Yermolai Alexeyevich)
- Tushka Bergen
- Anya
- Xander Berkeley
- Epihodov
- Gerald Butler
- Yasha
- Andrew Howard
- Petya Trofimov (Pyotr Sergeyevich)
- Melanie Lynskey
- Dunyasha
- Ian McNeice
- Pishchik (Semyon Semyonovich)
- Frances de la Tour
- Charlotta Ivanovna
- Michael Gough
- Feers
- Simeon Victorov
- Doridanov
- Izhak Finzi
- stranger
- Ivan Pangelov
- French priest
- Ivan Grigoriev
- Yevstigney
- Margarita Kemalova
- Yasha's mother
- Yuli Toshev
- auctioneer
- Todor Gheorghiev
- 1st bidder
- Vassili Trayanov
- Lopahin's friend
- Certificate
- PG
- Distributor
- Melanda Film Productions
- 12,717 feet
- 141 minutes 18 seconds
- Dolby SR
- In Colour
- 1.66:1