Books, Arts & Manners: Grey Eyes

The Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov and the Italian star Marcello Mastroianni have been gravitating toward each other for years. Mikhalkov, who adores Fellini’s 8½ and resees it before he starts shooting any film, perceived the actor as the archetypal Italian lover and Fellini exponent. The actor, who saw Mikhalkov’s Slave of Love, Oblomov, and Unfinished Piece for Player Piano (from Chekhov’s Platonov), loved the atmosphere of not so much dolce as bittersweet far niènte in those films, even as Mikhalkov is drawn to Western freedom of expression and lavishness. And so, as Hardy says in “The Convergence of the Twain,” about the Titanic and the fatal iceberg, “consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.” In the movie Dark Eyes, watered-down Chekhov meets freeze-dried Fellini in an encounter that should jar both East and West.

It is a film of great opulence even in its locations—Italian spas, gardens, villas, Russian villages, churches, palaces, land-and townscapes—shot with eye-dilating, very nearly cloying beauty by Franco di Giacomo. No expense was spared by the production designers, Mario Garabuglia and Alexander Adabachian (one of the scenarists— beware of movies co-scripted by designers), the costumer Carlo Diappi, and, above all, the producer, Silvia d’Amico Bendico. She is the daughter of Suso Cecchi d’Amico—with Mikhalkov, the third co-scenarist—and one of Italy’s most prolific screenwriters. But two hours of ravishing vistas and luxurious interiors cannot make up for that smidgen of intellectual and emotional authenticity nowhere to be found.

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John Simon

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The Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov and the Italian star Marcello Mastroianni have been gravitating toward each other for years. Mikhalkov, who adores Fellini’s 8½ and resees it before he starts shooting any film, perceived the actor as the archetypal Italian lover and Fellini exponent. The actor, who saw Mikhalkov’s Slave of Love, Oblomov, and Unfinished Piece for Player Piano (from Chekhov’s Platonov), loved the atmosphere of not so much dolce as bittersweet far niènte in those films, even as Mikhalkov is drawn to Western freedom of expression and lavishness. And so, as Hardy says in “The Convergence of the Twain,” about the Titanic and the fatal iceberg, “consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.” In the movie Dark Eyes, watered-down Chekhov meets freeze-dried Fellini in an encounter that should jar both East and West.

It is a film of great opulence even in its locations—Italian spas, gardens, villas, Russian villages, churches, palaces, land-and townscapes—shot with eye-dilating, very nearly cloying beauty by Franco di Giacomo. No expense was spared by the production designers, Mario Garabuglia and Alexander Adabachian (one of the scenarists— beware of movies co-scripted by designers), the costumer Carlo Diappi, and, above all, the producer, Silvia d’Amico Bendico. She is the daughter of Suso Cecchi d’Amico—with Mikhalkov, the third co-scenarist—and one of Italy’s most prolific screenwriters. But two hours of ravishing vistas and luxurious interiors cannot make up for that smidgen of intellectual and emotional authenticity nowhere to be found.