The Luzhin Defence

Starring:John Turturro, Emily Watson, Geraldine James, Stuart Wilson (II), Christopher Thompson, Fabio Sartor, Peter Blythe, Orla Brady, Mark Tandy, Kelly Hunter, Alexander Hunting, Alfredo Pea, Fabio Pasquini, Luigi Petrucci, Carlo Greco, Massimo Sarchielli, Luca Foggiano, Antonio Carli, David Ambrosi, GÃ©za Schramek
Director: Marleen Gorris
Studio: Sony Pictures
Product Type: DVD

Average customer rating:

Unique
Follow your bliss!
Beautiful movie adaptation of a heart-rending story
A cinematic patzer
Brilliant but confusing story of a mentally ill chess genius

The Luzhin Defence
Starring: John Turturro , Emily Watson , Geraldine James , Stuart Wilson (II) , and Christopher Thompson
Director: Marleen Gorris
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B00005N91D
Release Date: 2001-09-18

Customer Reviews:

Unique.......2006-08-14

I thought this was an odd movie. Luzhin in a champion chess player. He's at a tournament and he meets Natalia. They are smitten with each other and he proposes marriage. To say they are in love doesn't seem right. Her mother becomes upset at the idea of them together and says in so many words. Natalia always wants to take care of animals and people since she was a little girl.

He's very strange and no explanation is given. I'm thinking he has Asperger Syndrome. Flashbacks to his childhood shows him as a boy that doesn't talk much. He doesn't fit in at school and is told by the headmaster he needs to go someplace more suitable.

Let's just say this doesn't end well. I bet the novel by Vladimir Nabokov is better than this movie. If this sounds interesting, I suggest to read the book instead.

Follow your bliss!.......2005-03-28

There' s a big difference between these three concepts: duty, passion and bliss. Usually a great majority tends to overlap the first concept over the other two and that reveals an absolute clumsiness. The duty itself is bounded with all kind of unpleasant activity.

But if you examine briefly the Greek concept of the term amateur you will surprise: Amateur is that person who loves what does. So the little difference between passion and bliss is in the involvement or commitment level you decide add to your activity.

In this sense Luzhin defense deals about this last term: to follow your bliss, no matter how high be the prize you pay for reaching that goal . This inner satisfaction has nothing to do with economic profit. And that explains the devotion, vocation or frenzy according the case you face your reason to live in the world.

A Nobel Prize is simply a human being who has decided to study six thousand hours for instance to analyze a special issue. And the over passion of a Chess player it can not be understood but through this consideration.

Luzhin followed his bliss without care about any other consideration. The countless obstacles he had to overcome worked out much more as a challenge than a real warning. He did not mind any other issue.

This crude and painful portrait is superbly by John Turturro in his best performance on screen to date. The astonishing actress Emily Watson as his devoted lover is splendid too and the rest of the cast is excellent. Art direction and photograph deserve a sonorous applause , the script is memorable and the lesson of life is a perpetual evidence of integrity and trust in oneself far beyond the risks you may find on the road.

This film to my mind still remains among the greatest in this decade.

Based on the famous Vladimir Nabokov's novel The defence!

Beautiful movie adaptation of a heart-rending story.......2005-02-13

Having read Vladimir Nabokov's novel "The Defence", on which this film is based, many years ago, I was fascinated to see how the director would rise to a very challenging task. I was not disappointed: although the story is interpreted in a noticeably different way, it becomes a moving and remarkably unsentimental study of a strange, uniquely talented man and the young woman who suddenly and inexplicably falls in love with him.

There are certain technical constraints. In the novel, Nabokov spends a lot of time depicting Luzhin's internal states of mind. The chess-related flights of fantasy have mostly been eliminated, but John Turturro - who gives a magnificent performance throughout - successfully conveys Luzhin's bumbling, inconsequential attempts to comply with the social requirements of the situations he encounters. Very occasionally, one of the actors reminds one of a historic chess player - at times Turturro, unshaven and distracted, has overtones of Tal, and Fabio Sartor's suave Turati combines Capablanca's elegance with flashes of Kasparov's self-assurance.

The chess specifics are, sadly, not very accurate. Even in the 1930s, the world championship was never decided by a single game played between the winners of two sections of a tournament! Real grandmasters do not usually slam their clocks hard enough to break them, nor are they often surprised by snap checkmates in the endgame (although it has happened). But these compromises can be excused as artistic license, with the aim of making the story more exciting for non-players.

Everything else is beautifully done - the period sets, clothes and manners, the interplay of sporting dedication with business ambition and even romance, burgeoning suddenly in the most unexpected place and time. I would have been amazed to be told that a rendering of "The Defence" would feature sex scenes, but they are perfectly woven into the logic of the story. There is a certain vagueness, too, that mirrors real life - at least as seen by Nabokov. Natalia's mother, who seems dead set against her beloved daughter having anything to do with "that" (as she calls Luzhin after their first meeting), rallies round in time for the wedding. And as for Valentinov, Luzhin's former manager who unceremoniously dumped him when he went through a bad patch, what does he really want now?

Like so many of Nabokov's tales, "The Luzhin Defence" hovers ambiguously on the border between everyday reality and fantasy. If you accept it on its own terms, though, it is an absorbing experience.

A cinematic patzer.......2004-08-23

The novel of the same name by Nabokov should strike a reader as conventionally unfilmable. Perhaps in the fingers of Fellini, or David Lynch, something could be done, but if ever Ron Howard were to purchase the rights then it would be time to lament; Marleen Gorris is, sorrowfully, of the same school as the redoubtable Mr.Howard, although she most likely graduated with an even lower mark.
*
While the novel is less about obsessiveness and genius and more an example of both, the film is both about and an example of cliched emotions and hackneyed dramaturgy. Emily Watson and John Turturro are immensely talented but, frankly, their services are wasted, and I for one would have preferred a somewhat less gifted performer in the title role, say, Rush Limbaugh, for then, at least, I would not have been tempted to rent this movie, and the time given over to its viewing might have been more fruitfully spent cleaning the refrigerator shelves or, for that matter, playing chess.
*
Nabokov's book is not a realist novel, and one feature which betrays this is the virtual absence of motivation for Luzhin's behaviour (as an example: his autism is enigmatic, and prior to any childhood insult he is innately strange); the film-makers clearly feel that a character needs motivation, and so they inflict a crudely Freudian one upon him (this is especially ironic given Nabokov's ambivalent, but largely disparaging, opinion of glib Freudian analyses). Similarly, Nabokov takes extreme pains not to name the Emily Watson character, who is defined in terms of a morbid inclination to compassion, and who is otherwise seen as 'plump, pale, and quiet', and 'not particularly pretty' - of course, all this is unsatisfactory for Hollywood-style mass entertainment, and so we have the ravishing Ms.Watson. In like fashion, the somewhat seedy milieu of between-the-wars chess cafes is exchanged for the grandeur of the Northern Italian lakes, and the very shadowy figure of Valentinov becomes a technicolor villain. Perhaps the greatest irony is that all this pandering to entertainment proves anything but entertaining. The script is stilted and the drama, tired. The depiction of genius as intertwined with mental instability is very weary indeed, and borders on the offensive. The music is generic to the point of being fit for the supermarket aisles.
*
The cinematography deserves special condemnation. For a subject that remains personal and internal (even distorted unrecognisably from Nabokov's intentions), we see huge vistas, gardens, palaces and halls, Latinate grandeur and Russian opulence; the camera swoops and pans, and frames everything in a pretentious scale; even on its own terms, all this is done badly. Third-rate Merchant Ivory at best.
*
As for the chess...in the novel, Luzhin's obsession is rekindled when he is taken to his first motion picture, and where incidentally the heroine's 'grizzled father' is seen playing chess with the family doctor; a short quote, "In the darkness came the sound of Luzhin laughing abruptly. 'An absolutely impossible position for the pieces,' he said...". In the film, some positions are plausible, some not, but clearly no interest is shown in the game itself.
*
This was one of the worst films I have ever seen. Its pretence to seriousness and the promise of the actors made the disappointment all the greater.

Brilliant but confusing story of a mentally ill chess genius.......2004-06-16

Adapted from a novella by Vladimir Nabokov, this 2000 film is about the world of chess, genius, mental illness and romance. Set in the early 1920s in Italy, it stars John Turturro, cast as Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, an unkempt, awkward and disturbed chess master who is about to compete in a world chess tournament in a upscale resort. Emily Watson is cast as Natalia, a wealthy socialite who is bored with her mother's matchmaking and is, instead, attracted to the lonely and weird chess genius.

We see flashbacks about Luzhin's life which tries to explain his madness. The relationship between the two lead characters deepen. The tournament begins. We're all rooting for Luzhin. And then, his former chess mentor, played by Stuart Wilson, appears out of the blue. Wilson wants to destroy his former protégé and plots with Luzhin's opponent to do this. I was confused by this character because I didn't think the background had set him up enough.