Iya Savvina stars in the titular role as Anna Sergeyovna, a bewitching young beauty who fascinates the vacationing menfolk in Yalta, as she strolls wordlessly along the boardwalk with her white Pomeranian, seemingly unaware of their gazes and their inept flirtations.
The only man to penetrate her chilly demeanor is the dashing Dmitry Gurov (Aleksey Batalov), who offers the dog a scrap of food, then engages Anna in a purely casual conversation. As the relationship warms, it is revealed that both are married, and that Anna (who was a bride at age twenty) is particularly unhappy with her life back home in Saratov. Eventually the relationship is consummated, an event of enormous import to Anna, but apparently not to Dmitry, to whom it is apparently just one in a series. After the fateful tryst, when Anna pours our her soul to the refined gentleman, he maintains a proper emotional distance. "You seem to try to justify yourself. I don't want to know anything," he tells her, "Absolutely nothing." Then, as Anna passionately embraces him, he gazes in a mirror and calmly brushes his hair.
But, back in Moscow, Dmitry cannot ignore the emotional weight of the brief encounter, and it is he who finds himself reflecting on the moment, mooning for her, contemplating the purchase of a white Pomeranian, eventually making a pilgrimage to the bleak city of Saratov in search of the woman who meant more to him than he realized.
Unlike David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945), the Western film it most closely resembles, The Lady with the Dog does not harness its characters in the yoke of repression -- their own or society's -- but takes a more liberated view of marital indiscretion. The true drama lies not in the question of "Will they or won't they?" but the more subtle concern of, "Will they allow themselves to fall in love?"
As one might expect of a high-profile Soviet production paying homage to a great Russian writer, The Lady With the Dog does not venture far from Chekhov's text. In fact, some scenes are cinematically transcribed from the prose verbatim, as in the scene in which Dmitry puts Anna on a train back to Saratov. Quoting Chekhov: "The train moved off rapidly, its lights soon vanished from sight, and a minute later there was no sound of it, as though everything had conspired together to end as quickly as possible that sweet delirium, that madness. Left alone on the platform, and gazing into the dark distance, Gurov listened to the chirrup of the grasshoppers and the hum of the telegraph wires, feeling as though he had only just waked up." Director Iosif Kheifits makes sure it's all there on the screen -- every minute detail.
The visual notes struck by Kheifits often harmonize beautifully with Chekhov's text. The most poignant moment in the film occurs immediately following the lovers' initial union. Overcome with emotion, Anna sits at a table, staring at the candle that provides the Rembrant-like illumination for the shot. As Chekhov paints the moment, "Her face dropped and faded, and on both sides of it her long hair hung down mournfully; she mused in a dejected attitude like 'the woman who was a sinner' in an old-fashioned picture." The passage is not only faithfully realized, Kheifits emphasizes the sense of "an old-fashioned picture" by holding the shot for a particularly long time, with the actress frozen, perfectly still.
Another well-orchestrated scene is comprised of rich tableaus as Anna and Dmitry park their carriage on a mountainside and watch the sun's rays tear through the clouds above the peaks, a testament to the cinematographic talents of d.p.'s Dmitri Meskhiyev and Andrei Moskvin -- elaborating upon Chekhov's text, not merely illustrating it.
As expressive as these quiet moments are, Kheifits doesn't always trust the audience to absorb their emotional power. When he tries to force meaning into a scene, the impeccable tapestry he has created begins to fray. After returning to Moscow, Dmitry plays the piano to entertain his wife's guests. While playing, he becomes transfixed by the candle that glows before him. The longing in his eyes and the intensity of the music make it apparent that his heart still burns for Anna (the candle being a perfect metaphor, as well as a well-chosen narrative linking device). Regrettably, Kheifits dissolves from the shot of Dmitry to a flashback of Anna at her candle, telegraphing the meaning of the scene and thoroughly spoiling the moment. In any other film it would not be overkill, but in a film as graceful and nuanced as this, it breaks the emotional spell.
The scene that wanders furthest from Chekhov's story is one in which Dmitry and a wealthy, disenchanted friend dine in a lavish, but empty hall. When a guitarist comes to play a song, the friend stops him, and tells him instead to grunt like a pig. When the waiter complies, he is rewarded with money. The friend laments the willingness with which they "lackeys" humiliate themselves for moeny, "For just one ruple an engineer will gobble up a jar of mustard or sing a cock-a-doodle-doo." He then tosses a clean fork to the floor. When the servant replaces it with a new one, he then tosses that one, marveling at his subservience. When Dmitry is about to leave, Alexei offers him 500 ruples to sing a solo. Dmitry doesn't dignify the offer with a response, but drops some money on the table and exits. This scene does not appear in "Dama s sobachkoy," and it is surprising that the filmmakers would be permitted to suggest that the ruling class possesses a dignity and humanity that the lackeys have willfully sacrificed through their servitude -- an uncharacteristically subtle observation for a Soviet film of 1960 to make.
While the quality of sound and image are superlative (the latter being preserved through optional English subtitles), there are no special features on the DVD. The full-frame 1.33 image is crisp and well balanced, the only flaws being dark "printer flashes" that are an artifact of the original Soviet labwork (they occur most often at the points where optical dissolves are joined with camera footage). This is typical of Russian film of the period, and does not diminish one's appreciation of the film in the least.
It is unlikely that The Lady With the Dog (which was screened in competition at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival) will be resurrected as a neglected masterwork of Soviet cinema. However, it certainly deserves to rise from obscurity that Facets' DVD release affords it, for it is an exceptionally faithful and emotionally true adaptation of Chekhov's delicate, often difficult, prose.
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by Asa Kendall, Jr.
