BEFORE: Elisabeth Moss carries over from "The One I Love", and this is the third film out of the last four with a bird in the title - "Duck Butter", "Blue Jay" and now this. I didn't even see the connection there until just now.
I really don't know much about Chekhov plays - never seen one, or read one, or seen a movie based on one, so this is bound to be educational in some way at least. I know the NAMES of several Chekhov plays, but I'm probably more familiar with Jane Austen's works than his.
THE PLOT: In the early twentieth century, an aging actress and her lover visit the estate of her elderly brother.
AFTER: I'm the kind of guy who probably knows more about Pavel Chekhov than Anton Chekhov, if you know what I mean. I wasn't even sure this one belonged in a romance chain - Chekhov wrote about Russian people, right? Are Russians even capable of being in love? I was raised during the Cold War, so I was taught that Russia was the Evil Empire, and everybody living there was a godless Communist, and thought more about the state's needs than their own, and as I've said here, there's something inherently selfish about being in love, fulfilling one's own desires, and that doesn't seem like it fits in with the Communist ideology.
Ah, but a little research tells me this story is set in the early 1900's, the play was written in 1895, so it's pre-Bolshevik, pre-Lenin, pre-Communist Revolution. That could be significant here - plus it's set in the days of the Emperors (czars?), speficially Nicholas II, the last Russian emperor. The Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party didn't hold its first Congress until 1898, so Marxism was kind of in its infancy when "The Seagull" was written, good to know. Anyway, the cast here doesn't even seem particularly Russian, plus they seem to be rather upper-class, or at least well-off - these are the kind of people who owned lake houses, and they probably all would lose them in the redistribution of wealth that came along with the Revolution in 1917.
I may be dealing with two different stories here - the original play version of "The Seagull", which I'm reading up about on Wikipedia now, and the film version, which may diverge from Chehkov's play significantly, I'm not sure yet. But I'm here to learn. I shouldn't have worried about the romance factor, it turns out, because there are at least four love triangles going on in the movie - in the first half, Medvedenko the teacher is interested in Masha, the daughter of the estate's manager - but Masha is in love with Konstantin, the young playwright. Konstantin, in turn, is in love with Nina, the daughter of the rich landowner next door, and he writes a play for the estate's guests starring Nina. Nina, however, slowly turns her affections toward Boris, the writer who is visiting the estate as the lover of Irina, the aging actress who is also Konstantin's mother. So the whole crazy thing loops around and around, everyone loves somebody who is in love with somebody else. Oh, and the estate manager's wife is having an affair with the doctor, so that's at least four triangles, or two squares, and maybe a hexagon or two.
In the midst of this crazy set-up at the lake house, Konstantin debuts his new low-rent free-form play (this reminded me of the scene in Bergman's "Through a Glass Darkly") and his mother Irina just WON'T SHUT UP during the performance. He stops the play halfway through and goes to sulk in the barn. The next day, as Irina and Boris make plans to leave, Konstantin shoots a seagull - and I have a feeling this is some kind of important metaphor. Boris's conversation with Nina suggests that the gull is a symbol for her, she's just a happy girl, living by the lake, flying free like a seagull, when a man comes and shoots her dead, just because he can. But since the next day Konstantin tries to commit suicide with a gun, isn't it also valid to say that the seagull is a symbol for him?
Konstantin's suicide attempt is unsuccessful - better luck next time, I guess - and there are various arguments among the lake house residents. Irina argues with the estate's manager when he claims there are no horses to pull a carriage to take her into town. Pyotr Sorin, Irina's brother and the owner of the estate, finds it harder and harder to get around - he's slowly dying, but aren't we all? And young Nina runs away to become an actress, making plans to meet up with Boris the writer later in Moscow.
The final act (which is also seen at the beginning of the film, I'm pretty sure Chekhov didn't arrange his play that way) takes place two years later, by which time Masha has given up on Konstantin and married Medvedenko the teacher, Nina became an actress in Moscow and lived with Boris for a while, but he soon got bored with her and returned to his relationship with Irina. Konstantin has had some stories published in a magazine, but he's still depressed, and Pyotr Sorin is still slowly dying. And through it all, people gossip and cut each other down, but always somehow manage to do this within earshot of their victims, so everyone can learn the nasty things that other people say about them after they leave the room.
Some reviewers have noticed a connection to Shakespeare's "Hamlet", as Konstantin is unhappy that his mother has a new lover (one who's a better writer than her son is) and honestly, this casts a new Oedipal light on "Hamlet", like was Hamlet jealous of the new king, or that his mother was getting more action than he was? But this only goes so far, because I don't recall Ophelia ever rejecting Hamlet's affection so she could get with King Claudius. I saw a completely different parallel, perhaps because just before watching "The Seagull" I watched the first episode of "Allen vs. Farrow", the new 3-part docu-series on HBO. If you ask me, Boris here seems like a good analog for Woody Allen (both writers) and that makes Irina the stand-in for Mia Farrow, the aging actress. The tortured writer Konstantin is the Ronan Farrow analog (also a writer) and Nina is Dylan Farrow by default. Only the real-life story is much creepier, since Woody was accused of molesting Dylan, who is his daughter - my analogy doesn't perfectly line up either.
In the Russian performances of Chekhov's play, the suicide attempts took place off-stage, because at the time it was considered vulgar to depict such things in a play. During the final one, the estate guests even make up excuses for what that gunshot sound really was, and thus they try to keep Irina from learning about the fate of her son. But NITPICK POINT, how long can that family and friends keep her from learning the truth? Isn't she eventually going to start asking where her son is, and why he hasn't shown up for dinner in the last week?
Chekhov's play came up recently in the news, after Natalie Portman weighed in on the state of sexism and creepy men in America - she was cast as Nina in a Broadway production of "The Seagull" that played in Central Park in the summer of 2001. Working alongside acting legends like Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, Kevin Kline and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Portman sought advice from the play's director Mike Nichols, who encouraged her and helped her feel like she wasn't in over her head. She now calls Nichols the only older man who mentored her without there being a creepy element to it. Therefore, by extension, every other older man she worked with was a creep - and wasn't she in a Woody Allen film? Yeah, that checks out - but my lawyers have informed me that I can't list any of the other male directors she's worked for in this context.
Also starring Annette Bening (last seen in "Life Itself"), Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Little Women"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "The Report"), Mare Winningham (last seen in "Brothers"), Jon Tenney (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), Glenn Fleshler (last seen in "Joker"), Michael Zegen (last seen in "The Box"), Billy Howle (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Brian Dennehy (last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Ben Thompson, Angela Pietropinto (last seen in "One for the Money"), Barbara Tirrell, Elsie Brechbiel, Pippa Pearthree, Thomas Hettrick, Paul Krisikos, Ramona Wright.
RATING: 5 out of 10 bingo games
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