Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)

A rehearsal of Chekov's Uncle Vanya in a rundown New York theater. How exciting can this be? The answer is: very! I haven't seen other versions of the play, so I don't have much comparative material, but Louis Malle and his actors make conversational magic of the source text. The story is delivered in hushed, unfussy way. Yes, the film is theatrical but it is self-consciously so. I like that. I find myself wrapped up in the story and in the conflicts between the characters (and within the characters). The story is a sinewy tangle of class relations, unrequited love, love triangles and familial relations of all kinds. I read that the actors had performed the play in legendary form (before small and intimate audiences) which also shines through in the film: these actors know the text by heart, and even here, the performance has a strange form of intimacy that one would never expect from a film-based-on-famous-play. Julianne Moore plays Yelena, trophy wife of a hypochondriac, self-important professor, desired by two different men. She renders the characters with confusion, distance. She is brilliant! The sense of failure that almost all characters exude is translated with solemnity and sobriety, rather than dramatized sentimentality. I want to repeat this: initially, I was a bit turned-off by the concept of the film: theater-within-film. Silly and self-important, I thought. Afterwards, I realized this method was used to great effect, without lingering in formalism. Somehow, the film is alive in its rendering of actors-as-actors, without alienating us in a problematic way from the 'real' play. I want to watch this film a second time!