In a review in the New York Times, film critic Manola Dargis calls Fiona Glascott, one of the stars of the movie based on Anton Chekhov’s The Duel, a “milky beauty.”
Can’t think why.
Here is how Nadya, the character Glascott plays, is described when she’s first introduced in Chekhov’s short novel:
When he returned home, she was sitting at the window, dressed and with her hair done, and with a preoccupied face was drinking coffee and turning over the leaves of a fat magazine; and he thought the drinking of coffee was not such a remarkable event that she need put on a preoccupied expression over it, and that she had been wasting her time doing her hair in a fashionable style, as there was no one here to attract and no need to be attractive. And in the magazine he saw nothing but falsity. He thought she had dressed and done her hair so as to look handsomer, and was reading in order to seem clever.
No milkiness in that. And it gets worse.
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was ill in some way. Samoylenko said she had intermittent fever, and gave her quinine; the other doctor, Ustimovitch, a tall, lean, unsociable man, who used to sit at home in the daytime, and in the evenings walk slowly up and down on the sea-front coughing, with his hands folded behind him and a cane stretched along his back, was of opinion that she had a female complaint, and prescribed warm compresses. In old days, when Laevsky loved her, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna's illness had excited his pity and terror; now he saw falsity even in her illness. Her yellow, sleepy face, her lustreless eyes, her apathetic expression, and the yawning that always followed her attacks of fever, and the fact that during them she lay under a shawl and looked more like a boy than a woman, and that it was close and stuffy in -- all this, in his opinion, destroyed the illusion and was an argument against love and marriage.
But Chekhov isn’t describing her. He’s telling us how she’s appearing in the eyes of her self-centered lover, Laevsky, who is working up the nerve to abandon her. Laevsky is trying to convince himself that Nadya is somehow to blame for his no longer loving her and if he runs out on her she’ll have forced him to do it.
Poor, poor pitiful her, right?
Ah, but eventually Chekhov gets around to letting us see Nadya through her own eyes:
She felt perfectly well, and was in a gay holiday humour. In a new loose-fitting dress of coarse thick tussore silk, and a big wide-brimmed straw hat which was bent down over her ears, so that her face looked out as though from a basket, she fancied she looked very charming. She thought that in the whole town there was only one young, pretty, intellectual woman, and that was herself, and that she was the only one who knew how to dress herself cheaply, elegantly, and with taste. That dress, for example, cost only twenty-two roubles, and yet how charming it was! In the whole town she was the only one who could be attractive, while there were numbers of men, so they must all, whether they would or not, be envious of Laevsky.
So, Laevsky’s right. Nadya is all show.
Not quite.
…she had on two occasions in Laevsky's absence received a visit from Kirilin, the police captain: once in the morning when Laevsky had gone to bathe, and another time at midnight when he was playing cards. Remembering this, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna flushed crimson, and looked round at the cook as though she might overhear her thoughts. The long, insufferably hot, wearisome days, beautiful languorous evenings and stifling nights, and the whole manner of living, when from morning to night one is at a loss to fill up the useless hours, and the persistent thought that she was the prettiest young woman in the town, and that her youth was passing and being wasted, and Laevsky himself, though honest and idealistic, always the same, always lounging about in his slippers, biting his nails, and wearying her with his caprices, led by degrees to her becoming possessed by desire, and as though she were mad, she thought of nothing else day and night. Breathing, looking, walking, she felt nothing but desire. The sound of the sea told her she must love; the darkness of evening -- the same; the mountains -- the same. . . . And when Kirilin began paying her attentions, she had neither the power nor the wish to resist, and surrendered to him. . . .
What Chekhov’s developing is a dual psychological portrait of two bored, selfish, self-indulgent, and intellectually and morally lazy poseurs whose vanity is no longer flattered by their love affair. And both Laevsky and Nadya are so wrapped up in themselves that neither can begin to imagine that each is as boring to the other as the other is boring to her or him.
It doesn’t occur to Laevsky that Nadya will be anything but devastated if he leaves her, which is why he’s working so hard to convince himself that she deserves to be left. And while Nadya is a little bit less solipsistic, enough so that she can see that she irritates Laevsky and that she may be to blame in some way, she has folded that into her own personal romance of self. She sees herself as a tragic figure who through her suffering has earned the freedom to be unfaithful.
The Duel is an anti-romance about a pair of lovers neither of whom has a clue or an interest in having a clue as to what the other is thinking and feeling.
It seems to me that that’s a tricky situation to dramatize.
I’ve probably made Laevsky and Nadya sound more dislikable than they are. They’re both really comically sympathetic. Like Shakespeare, Chekhov wrote comedies that were tragedies and tragedies that were comedies turned inside out. The Duel is a comedy of manners. I wonder how funny the movie is though. I’ve yet to see a production of The Three Sisters that’s the laugh riot Chekhov intended. Still, I’m wondering how they can be made as amusingly disagreeable as they are without making them unwatchable. Milky beauty can only serve a character so well.
The Duel is about a love triangle, by the way. The duel of the title is incited by a self-righteous prig named Van Koren who imagines Nadya and Laevsky are far more romantic and interesting characters than they really are.
Van Koren has convinced himself that Laevsky, who can barely muster the energy to put on his shoes in the morning, is one of life’s great villains and that Nadya is far more of a long-suffering and deserving heroine than even she imagines herself to be. That he turns out to be in a fundamental way right, despite his romanticized misreading of their characters, is a complete accident and part of the joke.
Anton Chekhov’s The Duel probably won't play around here anyway, but it sounds like the sort of adaptation that is so faithful to its source that you might as well just have re-read the source and saved the cost of the ticket---I happen to re-read the source in this case every couple of years. I just re-read tonight. It's my favorite of Chekhov's short novels.
So near and yet so far: Anton Chekhov’s The Duel is playing at the Film Forum in New York City through May 11, 2010.
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