'The Seagull' Brings Chekhov's Doleful Comedy to Cinemas

Set in the country house where the famous actress Arkadina (Annette Bening) has returned to visit her ill brother, Sorin (Brian Dennehy), “The Seagull” plots the overlapping love affairs, most of them unhappy, among Arkadina, her lover (Corey Stoll), her son (Billy Howle), a neighbor girl (Saoirse Ronan) and the daughter of the estate manager (Elisabeth Moss). There is heartbreak, suicide, betrayal and breakdown. It is more or less a comedy.

“It’s so on the edge of hysterically funny and deeply tragic,” Bening said, speaking by telephone, “and we’re all attempting to find that way of doing it that comes across as authentic and human.”

Mayer, best known as a theater director, shot the film in 21 days in 2015, substituting a mansion in upstate New York for the dacha in the story. He and Karam worked to break “The Seagull” out of its static settings, creating more movement, more action, “a visual dance,” he said. But Mayer also emphasized a kind of radical intimacy that theater doesn’t always allow, capturing “private moments in a way that is magical,” Bening said. As her colleague Dennehy put it, Chekov’s “plays were written for the camera.”

“The Seagull” is only the latest film to join the gaggle of Chekhov adaptations — his IMDb page lists almost 500 others. These movies extend his doleful comedies across decades, cultures and nations, putting his words in the mouths of Australian ranchers, Japanese schoolgirls, French auteurs and jobbing New York actors. Here’s a quick sampling of some notable Chekhov’s translations from stage to screen.

The Sea Gull (1968)

As the 1960s swung on, director Sidney Lumet retreated to a Swedish idyll to film this heavy-handed, defiantly unfunny adaptation. Lumet’s stolid approach had yielded a decent “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” but here the performances feel outsized, the blocking and camera work constrained. If the international cast is impressive — James Mason, Simone Signoret, Vanessa Redgrave, David Warner, Kathleen Widdoes — none of them seem to be in the same movie. In The Times, Vincent Canby wrote that it was “so uneven in style, mood and performance that there are times when you could swear that the movie had shot itself — though not quite fatally.” You could fault translator Moura Budberg for her unhelpful fidelity to the play except that the few scenes departing from Chekhov are worse.

An Unfinished Piece for Player Piano (1977)

An unlikely adaptation of an impossible play — a sprawling, untitled, nearly unstageable early Chekhov work often called “Platonov” — Nikita Mikhalkov’s film is a classic of Soviet cinema. Set during a sun-drenched pre-revolution house party, it’s both an indictment of and an homage to a lost way of life. The story can be hard to follow, but the roguish sense of play and the wild tonal shifts are thrilling. The giddy comedy of the opening — songs, fortune telling, fake mustaches — skews darker and sadder until an unexpectedly redemptive ending buoys the piece back up. The lively ensemble cast, which includes Mikhalkov, is led by Alexander Kalaigin as a schoolteacher whose youthful illusions are dying hard.

Sakura No Sono (1990)

In this free-form adaptation, the students at an elite Japanese girls’ school gather each year to perform Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” When a student is caught smoking, administrators threaten to cancel the play. Adapted from a popular manga and unspooling over a single day, the modest movie is gauzy and elliptical. It shares a few of the themes of Chekhov’s original, a concern with tradition and modern life, permanence and evanescence. “The students come and go,” one character says. “But the blossoms stay here.” The director, Shun Nakahara, films the schoolgirls with a barely there eroticism, and that subtlety is maybe a surprise as Nakahara, who remade the film in 2008, later shifted into soft-core pornography.

Country Life (1994)

Like “An Unfinished Piece,” “Country Life” traipses between tragedy and farce. Directed by Michael Blakemore, this movie relocates “Uncle Vanya” to the Australian outback just after World War I, creating what The Times called “a film of charm and visual splendor.” Blakemore appears as Alexander, a failed theater critic, who brings his fragile, chilly young wife (Greta Scacchi) back to the estate run by his lonely daughter (Kerry Fox) and frustrated brother-in-law (John Hargreaves). A sexy Sam Neill plays a sunburned country doctor who catches the eyes of both women. The acting is terrific, the interiors and exteriors are strongly evocative, and this is almost certainly the only Chekhov adaptation to include a close-up of lusty kangaroos.

Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)

For many, this is the most perfect film of any Chekhov play, maybe because it doesn’t feel much like a film at all. In 1989 director André Gregory gathered a group of actors (including Wallace Shawn and before-she-was-a-star Julianne Moore) for a multiyear exploration of “Uncle Vanya.” When they opened the workshop to a few friends, word spread, and eventually Louis Malle agreed to film it. His framing device follow the actors to their rehearsal. (Catch that opening shot of Shawn chomping a knish.) But as they slip into character, still wearing their street clothes, that outside world disappears. A quiet heartbreaker, “Vanya on 42nd Street” is a valentine to the powers of theater and film.

La Petite Lili (2003)

Another “Seagull,” Claude Miller’s movie relocates the action to a French chateau, a retreat for film star Mado Marceaux (Nicole Garcia) and her director boyfriend, Brice (Bernard Giraudeau), who disrupt the lives of Mado’s son (Robinson Stévenin) and his sweetheart (Ludivine Sagnier). This being France, there’s wine, sex, cigarettes and talk of Proust. (And oh the cheekbones!) The movie’s first two-thirds are fairly faithful, but a daring final act, a more deliberate and affirming meditation on art and life, transmutes the tragic ending into something more wistful. It’s also notable as the only adaptation to give the mournful character of Masha (the estate manager’s daughter), played here by a lovely Julie Depardieu, a happy ending.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.