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Friday, July 17, 2020

The Seagull (2018)

Yet another Chekhov play put to the screen.  This one has a Shakespearean tragedy written all over it.  The play was first performed in 1896 and was a complete disaster.  It wasn't until a re-staging of it two years later that it became a hit, and Chekhov, a short story writer, went on to write several more masterpieces before his premature death at 44 years old from tuberculosis.
The play is known for introducing a naturalistic form of writing that challenged the melodramatic conventions and cliches of the time, and is often credited with introducing subtext to the theater. Of note, it involves writers and actors in equal parts, who are at once at odds with each other and in love with the wrong people, in a Much Ado About Nothing sort of way, but one which leans more heavily on the tragic than the comic.  The acting is superb, with Annette Benning giving a spectacular performance as the aging yet talented actress who cannot quite step out of her admiration of herself to take care of anyone else, not her son nor her aging brother.  It is a very Russian masterpiece.

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