By Kevin B. Lee
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]
Anton Chekhov's "The Lady with a Dog" is arguably my all time favorite short story. It's so many beautiful things at once. Descriptions as light and delicate as snowflakes are combined with a hearty narration that's both impassive yet empathetic. In a half-hour's reading time you marvel in a symphony of moods: melancholy, sarcasm, infatuation, disdain, lust, hope, despair, and finally a sense of love that's as helpless as it's hopeful. Josef Heifetz made a masterful Soviet film adaptation 50 years ago, but I would love to see another version—possibly even set to contemporary times, since Chekhov's brilliant diagnosis of the social circumstances that breed love can be applied practically anyplace and anywhere. I'd certainly welcome such an effort over Nikita Mikhalkov's supersized and superficial international prestige parade, a film so bombastic and unsubtle that it's everything Chekhov isn't.
To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.
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