The Luzhin Defence (2000)

Beautifully filmed -- but leaves questions

This beautifully filmed movie is an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel by the same name. The sets/locations are gorgeous, and the acting quite adequate.

The story concerns the mental disintegration of a chess master, Luzhin. He is portrayed as a kind and sincere person, though perhaps too naïve. As the story progresses Luzhin becomes involved in a critical chess match. The stresses prove too much, leading to his mental breakdown and destruction.

Those who have not read Nabokov's novel will probably find the film both entertaining and enlightening, as well as a glimpse into the world of professional chess.

But those who have read Nabokov's novel might be disappointed. For the movie simplifies too much. Nabokov had a talent for providing a comic touch to essentially very dark subjects. The movie takes a different approach: it lightens the topic by concentrating all evil into a single character, an unscrupulous trainer/agent. This produces two-dimensional cardboard characters.

Nabokov's book explores the deeper question whether total immersion into abstract mental activities might be deleterious to the human psyche. A neglected child, Luzhin immersed himself in the rational and secure world of chess. Was the withrawal from the world of social interaction the root cause of Luzhin's problems -- or was there a deeper reason yet?

The writer G. K. Chesterton conjectured that:
"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity."

After viewing the film I recommend reading the novel -- and forming your own conclusions.
January 31, 2008

Insanity and chess

John T. plays the chess genius with sincerity and compassion. The poor man could not function in real life. But then most true genius is on another plain of existence. He needed a constant companion. His background probably explains a lot about the adult. I wish the movie had gone into more detail about his troubled childhood. Well done, but a little too long. Enjoy! October 1, 2007

Unique

I thought this was an odd movie. Luzhin in a champion chess player. He's at a tournament and he meets Natalia. They are smitten with each other and he proposes marriage. To say they are in love doesn't seem right. Her mother becomes upset at the idea of them together and says in so many words. Natalia always wants to take care of animals and people since she was a little girl.

He's very strange and no explanation is given. I'm thinking he has Asperger Syndrome. Flashbacks to his childhood shows him as a boy that doesn't talk much. He doesn't fit in at school and is told by the headmaster he needs to go someplace more suitable.

Let's just say this doesn't end well. I bet the novel by Vladimir Nabokov is better than this movie. If this sounds interesting, I suggest to read the book instead. August 14, 2006

Beautiful movie adaptation of a heart-rending story

Having read Vladimir Nabokov's novel "The Defence", on which this film is based, many years ago, I was fascinated to see how the director would rise to a very challenging task. I was not disappointed: although the story is interpreted in a noticeably different way, it becomes a moving and remarkably unsentimental study of a strange, uniquely talented man and the young woman who suddenly and inexplicably falls in love with him.

There are certain technical constraints. In the novel, Nabokov spends a lot of time depicting Luzhin's internal states of mind. The chess-related flights of fantasy have mostly been eliminated, but John Turturro - who gives a magnificent performance throughout - successfully conveys Luzhin's bumbling, inconsequential attempts to comply with the social requirements of the situations he encounters. Very occasionally, one of the actors reminds one of a historic chess player - at times Turturro, unshaven and distracted, has overtones of Tal, and Fabio Sartor's suave Turati combines Capablanca's elegance with flashes of Kasparov's self-assurance.

The chess specifics are, sadly, not very accurate. Even in the 1930s, the world championship was never decided by a single game played between the winners of two sections of a tournament! Real grandmasters do not usually slam their clocks hard enough to break them, nor are they often surprised by snap checkmates in the endgame (although it has happened). But these compromises can be excused as artistic license, with the aim of making the story more exciting for non-players.

Everything else is beautifully done - the period sets, clothes and manners, the interplay of sporting dedication with business ambition and even romance, burgeoning suddenly in the most unexpected place and time. I would have been amazed to be told that a rendering of "The Defence" would feature sex scenes, but they are perfectly woven into the logic of the story. There is a certain vagueness, too, that mirrors real life - at least as seen by Nabokov. Natalia's mother, who seems dead set against her beloved daughter having anything to do with "that" (as she calls Luzhin after their first meeting), rallies round in time for the wedding. And as for Valentinov, Luzhin's former manager who unceremoniously dumped him when he went through a bad patch, what does he really want now?

Like so many of Nabokov's tales, "The Luzhin Defence" hovers ambiguously on the border between everyday reality and fantasy. If you accept it on its own terms, though, it is an absorbing experience. February 13, 2005

A cinematic patzer

The novel of the same name by Nabokov should strike a reader as conventionally unfilmable. Perhaps in the fingers of Fellini, or David Lynch, something could be done, but if ever Ron Howard were to purchase the rights then it would be time to lament; Marleen Gorris is, sorrowfully, of the same school as the redoubtable Mr.Howard, although she most likely graduated with an even lower mark.
*
While the novel is less about obsessiveness and genius and more an example of both, the film is both about and an example of cliched emotions and hackneyed dramaturgy. Emily Watson and John Turturro are immensely talented but, frankly, their services are wasted, and I for one would have preferred a somewhat less gifted performer in the title role, say, Rush Limbaugh, for then, at least, I would not have been tempted to rent this movie, and the time given over to its viewing might have been more fruitfully spent cleaning the refrigerator shelves or, for that matter, playing chess.
*
Nabokov's book is not a realist novel, and one feature which betrays this is the virtual absence of motivation for Luzhin's behaviour (as an example: his autism is enigmatic, and prior to any childhood insult he is innately strange); the film-makers clearly feel that a character needs motivation, and so they inflict a crudely Freudian one upon him (this is especially ironic given Nabokov's ambivalent, but largely disparaging, opinion of glib Freudian analyses). Similarly, Nabokov takes extreme pains not to name the Emily Watson character, who is defined in terms of a morbid inclination to compassion, and who is otherwise seen as 'plump, pale, and quiet', and 'not particularly pretty' - of course, all this is unsatisfactory for Hollywood-style mass entertainment, and so we have the ravishing Ms.Watson. In like fashion, the somewhat seedy milieu of between-the-wars chess cafes is exchanged for the grandeur of the Northern Italian lakes, and the very shadowy figure of Valentinov becomes a technicolor villain. Perhaps the greatest irony is that all this pandering to entertainment proves anything but entertaining. The script is stilted and the drama, tired. The depiction of genius as intertwined with mental instability is very weary indeed, and borders on the offensive. The music is generic to the point of being fit for the supermarket aisles.
*
The cinematography deserves special condemnation. For a subject that remains personal and internal (even distorted unrecognisably from Nabokov's intentions), we see huge vistas, gardens, palaces and halls, Latinate grandeur and Russian opulence; the camera swoops and pans, and frames everything in a pretentious scale; even on its own terms, all this is done badly. Third-rate Merchant Ivory at best.
*
As for the chess...in the novel, Luzhin's obsession is rekindled when he is taken to his first motion picture, and where incidentally the heroine's 'grizzled father' is seen playing chess with the family doctor; a short quote, "In the darkness came the sound of Luzhin laughing abruptly. 'An absolutely impossible position for the pieces,' he said...". In the film, some positions are plausible, some not, but clearly no interest is shown in the game itself.
*
This was one of the worst films I have ever seen. Its pretence to seriousness and the promise of the actors made the disappointment all the greater. August 23, 2004

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