Sensation seeking

This adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play is handsomely mounted, as they say, and features a stellar cast (including Annette Bening, Elisabeth Moss and Saoirse Ronan), but it won’t be setting the world alight. It is not a waste of 90 minutes, and Bening is superb, as if you even needed me to tell you that. But it doesn’t especially distinguish itself otherwise and I kept waiting for it to deliver emotionally. I waited and waited and waited, but no, nothing.

The film is, of course, set on a country estate just outside Moscow, because if it weren’t set on a country estate just outside Moscow it plainly wouldn’t be Chekhov. The basic deal, if you don’t already know, is that everyone gathered at the estate is in love with someone who is in love with someone else. Medvedenko (Michael Zegen), the schoolteacher, is in love with Masha (Moss), the estate manager’s daughter, who is in love with Konstantin (Billy Howle), the aspiring writer, who is in love with Nina (Ronan), the ingénue from the neighbouring estate, who is in love with Boris (Corey Stoll), the successful writer who is, in turn, the boyfriend of Irina (Bening), Konstantin’s mother and a fading actress. There is a dog, but we never get to know if the dog is in love with the bitch that’s in love with that other dog, the one from the next village, although I would fully expect this to be the case.

Directed by Michael Mayer (A Home at the End of the World, but otherwise a theatre director), with a screenplay by Stephen Karam (author of the Tony-award winning stage play The Humans), the film opens with a scene from near the end of the play, when Irina is summoned to Sorin’s bedside.