The Gull

With me already having written one post for today, my next post is going to be a bit briefer of a review than normal, although that's also in part because it's a movie based on a classic work of literature: a 1968 international production of The Sea Gull.

The movie is of course based on the play by Anton Chekhov, which probably should have been originally translated as just The Gull since the movie isn't set anywhere near the sea. Instead, it's set at a country estate somewhere not far south of Moscow where bureaucrat Sorin lives. His sister Arkadina (Simone Signoret) visits; she's a successful actress whose son Konstantin (David Warner) would like to be a writer but is writing more daring stuff that the public doesn't care for.

More successful with the public is Trigorin (James Mason), but he doesn't much care for the sort of stuff that sells commercially; he's also carrying on an affair with Arkadina. And then, living over on the next estate, is young Nina (Vanessa Redgrave). Konstantin has been pursuing her, but she meets someone successful like Trigorian and she's immediately smitten with that achievement. The various characters see each other and philosophize a lot, to the point that the whole proceedings get boring.

Eventually, it comes time for everyone not living in the area to go home, except that Nina goes off with Trigorin to become his mistress. Two years pass, and most of the same characters return to Sorin's estate because he's getting to the age where everybody expects him to die soon. There's more philosophizing, and then an ending that's a bit shocking.

Apparently the first performance of the play back in the 1890s was a critical failure and it wasn't until a few years later when a new production was an artistic breakthrough. I'd never seen any version of the play, nor read it, before seeing this version of the movie. All I can say is that having seen this movie, I can understand why the original stage play was a failure. The one thing that the movie has going for it is the settings; the movie was filmed in Sweden with lake areas just outside Stockholm substituting for country Russia, and doing so rather beautifully.

However, I think Signoret is miscast as a Russian actress, while director Sidney Lumet didn't do anything particularly imaginative in the direction. The actors mostly declaim their lines, as if they're not on screen together, and since the movie is slow and talky, none of this really helps the production.