United States, 1994
Directed by Louis Malle
With Andre Gregory (Himself), Wallace Shawn (Himself/Vanya), Brooke Smith (Herself/Sonya), Julianne Moore (Herself/Yelena), Georges Gaynes (Himself/Dr. Serybryakov), Larry Pine (Himself/Dr. Astrov), Lynn Cohen (Herself/Maman), Phoebe Brand (Herself/Nanny), Jerry Mayer (Himself/Waffles), Madhur Jaffrey (Mrs. Chao), Oren Moverman (Filip Innunu)
The usual throngs of the bustling New York streets fill the screen, shot by a camera standing still as it takes the medium and long shots, but always moved from one corner to another, hence the swift jumble of pictures opening the film. Some faces may catch the attention, often because they are white while by chance many passers-by are African Americans. Then some of those faces hail each other, come closer, form little groups, then a big one. One of those New Yorkers, who happens to be actor Wallace Shawn, introduces to another, who happens to be theater director Andre Gregory, a recent foreign acquaintance, Mrs. Chao, who herself introduces to them another foreigner, Filip Innunu. The four start to talk about the works of Anton Chekhov as, following the rest of the band, they step in an abandoned theater. All those people seem then to wander inside the place, casually chatting, sitting anywhere. Shawn, who complained he did not sleep at all at night, lies on a bench, while actress Phoebe Brand and actor Larry Pine begins small talks that quickly sound out of touch with the previous chatters but very much like the lines of a play.
That is natural: as Gregory told Mrs. Chao, today is the day the team runs through the famous Chekhov play “Dadya Vanya – Uncle Vanya”. But the magic is how life was vividly and quite realistically captured only to fade slowly in a performance – how natural the shooting, camerawork, editing of director Louis Malle have succeeded in bringing the audience from life in the streets to the core of Chekhov’s world, simply following artists as they come and are is wonderful, and riveting.
This stunning fluidity, this apparent absence of arty action, this quiet dismissal of technical and intellectual transitions keep defining the film as the play unfolds – when the first act ends, the camera just pans to catch Gregory telling Mrs. Chao, Filip Innunu, and others persons who have unknowingly to the audience grown the ranks of spectators, that now a second act is about to start in another section of the stage, at another time in Chekhov’s narrative, a few days later by night precisely; and the feat would be repeated at the end of the other acts, the camera keeping roving in the theater.
Changing the frame, the type of shots (usually the angles and focuses barely vary) is enough to dive again deep in the performance. The solid work of the cast is easily heightened by close-ups, with the camera carefully moving around them. The effect is definitely vivid and what the actresses and actors try to convey is powerfully grasped as they deliver their lines and find the most genuine, relevant emotions. It is a truly beautiful observation of what interpretation is as it happens and tries to render the truth of a text.
Actually, what the film offers is a real screenplay wrote by Gregory, based on his work on this peculiar show and with the purpose of making a movie with Malle in mind, but the show is based on an adaptation of a translation of the original text by David Mamet. In a way, this is a 1990s, American Vanya that the audience discovers, with an accent and a style that sound modern-day and persuasive but still remarkably faithful to the ideas of Chekhov, and through a vision that strives, successfully, to skip usual artistic conventions. This is obviously not a period piece, the kind that many producers would have funded and many spectators would have enjoyed, but neither is this a documentary simply recording a performance, without many cinematic ideas intruding on the stage. In fact, this is not even a performance: it is an umpteenth rehearsal of Mamet’s text, part of a personal experience that kept busied Gregory in the 1990s, the idea of gathering a few actors in a disused place to explore the text when possible and without relying much on the theatrical sets, props, rules, and without the aim of really performing the play in front of an audience in a big theater – a kind of never-ending workshop on Chekhov (the playhouse that was first chosen was the Victory Theater, but to shoot the film, the team just crossed the street and settled in The New Amsterdam Theater, 214 West 42nd street, Manhattan, who used to feature the Ziegfeld Follies). As Gregory tells the fictional Mrs. Chao, people are free to attend the rehearsals and yet this is not really a show, if only because of the way artists and others can mingle and the proximity they keep all along, features Malle eagerly underlines.
“Vanya on 42nd Street” could be described as blurring the lines, or knocking down the walls, but it could as well, more precisely, as simply dissolving what is expected to be separated and tagged, images gradually vanishing to expose fresh one within the same frame, with the same person. With its masterful beginning, the film makes clear art drifts from the beat and the stream of life, and the painstaking work on words, emotions, and images slowly reveals how the actors dig deep in themselves to reach the meaning of their characters, finding the authenticity and complexity life is made of, and to find the resonance the text can have across the years, especially when it delves so deep in the themes of how a life can be spoiled, or saved, what to hope, or fear, from others, what is the point of carrying on with life, or of giving it up. The actors advance in the maze of feelings and frustrations the Russian playwright has crafted and what they experience is right away felt by the audience without being framed, predefined by conspicuous settings and traditional frameworks. Accompanied by the wondrous saxophone of Joshua Redman, this Vanya feels like coming out of the street, still living with us, reflecting our deepest concerns and sentiments.
The lead character is played by Shawn in an amazing manner: it is not just a melancholy character, but a far livelier man, mischievous, often moody to be true, but also funny and honest. His despair is tinged with scathing irony while his romanticism is deeply sincere and heartbreaking. He comes across as a brooding failed intellectual and a spirited tragic clown. The other impressive performer among the highly skilled cast is Julianne Moore, who makes Yelena a poignant and fascinating young woman painfully aware of her shortcomings and awkward situation, a delicate person who charms a lot but cannot hide real limitations, whose indolence cannot be tamed even as she wishes to love everybody, and to prove it.
She struggles to handle the love she inspires to her husband, Dr. Serybryakov, her stepbrother, Vanya, and her stepbrother’s best friend, Dr. Astrov, with these latter suitors set to be disillusioned. The troubles, a contagious laziness included, she inadvertently stirs make up the bigger, more emotional part of the plot, but at the end are eclipsed by the other feeling gnawing at Vanya’s soul, his resentment for Serybryakov, the man who married Vanya’s beloved but dead sister and fathered Sonya, the intellectual who has been worshiped by the family, starting with Maman, Vanya’s mother, but who is now deemed a fraud and a leech. The tensions lead to anger and exhaustion, and eventually most of the dramatis personae leave the tranquil, boring Russian estate, and Sonya would have the final word, with her memorable call for resignation in the wait of the sweetest hereafter. For the film, the end is a final ensemble shot, with relaxed and satisfied actors chatting again, Chekhov’s text fully explored and brought to life, moving back to more mundane things – what remains is the spell they found the way to cast, the magic of a realistic interpretation that proved conventions do not matter as much as that quest to grasp the truth of the characters.