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Soviet Director and Italian Star Triumph in Dark Eyes
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13223 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1987 |
961 Words |
| Author
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Karen Jaehne
Karen Jaehne is a free-lance writer based in New York
specializing in films. |
Take a freewheeling adaptation of some of Anton Chekhov's short stories, a Soviet director - Nikita Mikhalkov - who revels in affectionate portrayals of pre-revolutionary Russia, and Italy's great international star Marcello Mastroianni and the result is Dark Eyes (Ocio Ciornie), the unqualified hit of this May's fortieth Cannes Film Festival.
It is easy to see why the festival jury's decision to give the Best Actor prize to Mastroianni was roundly acclaimed in a year when the audience responded with hostility to a number of other awards. Mastroianni played an aging, charming, thoroughly irresponsible idler who provokes a very genuine, deep passion from a proper Russian matron.
Always a remarkable actor, with age Mastroianni seems, if possible, to be getting even better. The film is recounted by a shabby, aged Mastroianni whom we find on board a ship at the turn of the century. He introduces himself to a kindly Russian passenger and begins to tell his story with a charming irony.
Rich Background
The film moves into flashback, and we see Mastroianni as Romano, an Italian architect living in Russia, married to rich aristocrat Elisa (Silvana Mangano), who had fallen in love with him when he was a poor student and who still defends him against her disapproving family.
Romano has the habit of fleeing abroad to one spa or another - for reasons of health he claims - but the trips usually coincide with problems he does not want to face. Once at the spa he
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