The Eyes Have It

Dark Eyes

Directed by Nikita Mikhalkev

At the USA Nickolodeon

In Italian With English Subtitles

CULTURE SHOCK comes to the cinema in Dark Eyes, filmed in both the USSR and Italy. Director Nikita Mikhalkov is Russian, while his actors and their dialogue are Italian. Based on several short stories by Anton Chekhov, the film stars that mainstay of Italian cinema, Marcello Mastroianni, as a womanizer (what else?). Russian in outlook but quintessentially Italian in its characterization, Dark Eyes is a unique and almost dizzying blending of the two cultures from which it is drawn.

Dark Eyes tells the tale of Romano, a Don Juan who has lost both his wife and the only other woman he ever loved. A once promising architect who married well above his rank, Romano is now reduced to being a maitre d' at the restaurant on a QE 2-like boat. Who should walk in but a happily married man in search of a drink? The two get to talking, and the history of Romano's lost loves unfolds. And a rich tale it is indeed.

Dark Eyes illustrates Romano's saga with colorful acting and superb cinematography. Like Mikhalkov's earlier Oblomov, Dark Eyes is set in an era of decadence. It is fun to see the fancy balls, elaborate spas, mansions and frills that are all part of the scene. Mikhalkov's characters move about in this effusively elegant world with a naturalness which most films about the turn-of-the-century fail to capture. But with its shift from one setting to another, the film almost has the feel of a pictorial travelogue.

The film's humorous elements are its greatest attraction. Mastroianni plays a man with a vivid, even clownish imagination, a part at which he is particularly adept. "How could you marry a man like that. He should have been a clown," Romano's mother-in-law says early in the film.

Even on the field of love, Romano lacks solemnity. In the sequence in which he begins to woo Anna, he tells a hilarious cock-and-bull story about his life. Anna asks him how he injured his leg. "Have you heard of Vesuvius?" he asks her. She has indeed heard of the volcano and knows it erupted several centuries before, so Romano changes his story to "My ancestors were from Pompeii."

Romano may be flippant, but he is not without charm, which Mastroianni's warm voice, Latin gestures and aging face bring out. Who can resist a man who is willing to wade in a medicinal mud bath to retrieve a lady's hat--while dressed in white tie? Not Anna (Elena Sofovna), nor even her dog Sabatchka (the word has deep metaphysical meaning--little dog--and becomes a silly symbol of the relationship between Anna and Romano).

Sofovna creates Anna as a somewhat batty, very neurotic woman repressed by her repulsive, narcissistic husband. It is hard to believe, with the background Mikhalkov gives her, that Romano is her first flirt with adultery, or the romantic notion that she learned to read Italian from songs. Still, Sofovna is so convincing, because of the odd twitches with which she endows her character, that the final plot twist is hardly surprising.

Dark Eyes has its problems, but just to see the scenery and the costumes is worth $5.50. It's a fun tour through an idealized age of extravagance that will leave you breathless and giddy.