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Released on DVD by Facets in 2008.
Lady with the Dog (Josfi Kheifits, 1960)
The Chekhov short story from which Kheifits' film is taken is a paragon of economy, weighing in at fewer than seven thousand words in the Constance Garnett translation and offering a tale of transparent simplicity. Within a couple of pages, Dimitri Gurov, a bored, thirty-something bank official on vacation at Yalta away from his wife and children, has courted and seduced the lady of the title, Anna Sergeyevna (Iya Savvina), who, unhappily married to a provincial politico, also vacations solo, accompanied only by her small white dog.
Lady with the DogTrapped in a loveless marriage, prearranged when he was a boy, Gurov (Aleksey Batalov) has become adept at managing brief transient affairs that barely ruffle the surface of a soul-deadening existence set on autopilot. But with Anna, he discovers, it's different: they have both fallen in love in a way that disobeys the perimeters of a summer affair: "They loved each other like people very close and akin, like husband and wife, like tender friends," announces Chekhov. As both return to their married lives, the lovers find themselves meeting sporadically, in a discreet Moscow hotel, to share for a few hours at a time what demands to be shared over the space of two lifetimes.
"We're like two migrating birds, caught and housed in separate cages," says Anna in one of the film's final scenes, "and they're going to die of grief."
Savvina, whose previous acting experience had been solely in college theater, was around twenty-two when cast in Lady, the precise age of her character as Chekov's story opens in Yalta. Gurov finds the young, inexperienced provincial an easy target for seduction. One of the film's most indelible images has Anna, her long blond hair undone after their first sexual encounter, weeping from intense remorse in front of a single lit candle while Gurov at a distance listlessly picks seeds from a watermelon slice.
"What do you want?" is all he can say to her outpouring of despair. As lit by the candle, Savvina looks even younger than her years and a hapless victim; Batalov, with close-cropped beard and arched eyebrows, is the bored roué, a predator. Yet before the week is out and Anna leaves Yalta for home, the two of them are passionate equals, adrift in the same boat far from the moorings of convention and morality. Implicit in their predicament is the impossibility of divorce.
Batalov, a handsome actor who was to give a memorable performance ten years later as a sadistic White Russian officer in the Soviet film The Flight, delivers an astonishingly nuanced portrayal of Gurov, who in the course of the film becomes increasingly sensitive and vulnerable to the emotional depths of his love, Anna. By film's end the demands of his compartmentalized life seem to have made him frail and prematurely aged.
Savvina is radiant throughout. When she trains her translucent, light blue (we assume) eyes on Gurov, we understand why he can't bear to hold them too long with his own: there's simply too much unquestioning love streaming out from them. Savvina's performance should be hailed as legendary; it's her unaffected beauty, her precise, high-pitched diction, and ability to project a pure singularity of feeling that gives this film such an air of transcendence. Hers is a performance that seems more to be sung than merely acted.
Kheifits, his writers, art director, and photographer have endowed the film with a novelist's attention to detail, some of which has been gleaned from Chekov and some added. Diegetic music proves important: dissonant to the blossoming romance, there are brass bands playing the promenade at Yalta, and, when Gurov surprises Anna at her small-town home base, it's at the provincial opera house, which is staging an authentic period operetta, noted by Chekov, The Geisha (1896, Sidney Jones). It's likely the pit band in the film plays from the actual score of this piece (it sounds like Offenbach), and their playing is less than stellar, capturing with precision Gurov's impression of the orchestra in Chekov's text as "wretched," with "feeble" violins. When outside Anna's house, Gurov paces along "the long gray fence studded with nails" described by Chekov, we hear piano music, and it's a Chopin piece played well by Anna. Earlier, in Moscow, the film introduces us to Gurov's piano playing; he attempts a lighter "album leaf" kind of parlor piece and is clearly not as gifted nor as musical as Anna. This discrepancy, alive to the state of each character's inner life, is a nuance belonging to the film alone.
Lady with the Dog also carries a sublime orchestral underscore by Nadezhda Simonyan. Its main theme, a broad, Tchaikovskian cantilena, expresses the sweet bliss of their initial Yalta affair. As Gurov, back in Moscow, performs his parlor piece in front of family and friends, memories of Anna flood his consciousness and Simonyan's tune overwhelms the piano music. But the tune also plays to the couples' resigned grief. Sounding for the last time, it accompanies Gurov's wave from the snow-covered street as Anna peers from the lit window several stories above him. The calm, gentle affection of his gesture (saying: I know you're sad, so am I, but I'll be back) combining with the heightened pathos of Simonyan's melody is one of the great romantic moments in cinema.
Facets' transfer, effectively nullifying the Ruscico effort available from Image, is nearly flawless, allowing the exquisite photography — especially the Yalta scenes — its full emotional grandeur. One of the most essential, gratifying discs of 2008.
USSR/1960/B&W/89 mins./In Russian with English subtitles. Released on DVD by Facets in 2008.
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