"The Admirer" — When a Soviet Classic Burns Out

I don't want cinema in which Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is mocked quite this shamelessly.

I sat honestly through all of Vitaly Melnikov's "The Admirer" — the man who made "The Elder Son," no less. It was shot in 2012, from the sentimental memoirs of Lidia Avilova, who did in fact know Chekhov.

At first glance it's fine: you can see the money on screen, the cast is well chosen, and the cinematographer is Astakhov, who shot nearly all of Balabanov's films.

But I was being walked, very carefully and deliberately, toward tears by a cheaply built romance between Chekhov and this same Avilova. Kornelyuk even wrote a special melodramatic theme for the occasion.

I stubbornly refused all of it, and at one point was ready to say so out loud in the Lenfilm cinema. Because there's no need to keep insisting the film was shot in St. Petersburg by showing me postcard views of it. I understood.

And I realised that for some reason I believe "Beanpole," which is nowhere near realistic, and don't believe "The Admirer," which is stuffed so deliberately with Chekhov quotations.

That's usually how it goes with ageing Soviet classics: they burn out, and people go on asking them to direct anyway — or they want to themselves, out of habit.

The most solid actors of the moment agree to it, naturally. "The Admirer" has a serious cast — Tabakov, Kirill Pirogov, Svetlana Kryuchkova, and that's just the leads. Everyone else is accomplished too, and their characters are flat and dull and drawn in one line.

If the excellent Oleg Andreev plays a jealous husband, then a jealous husband is all he gets to be — no drama, no Chekhovian torment. Sergei Barkovsky's sketch does come off, though: the moustached owner of a collapsing literary paper, with the light and the make-up and the setting all exactly right.

The rest is a heavy costume construction, working the state budget for everything it's worth.