Luzhin Defence [DVD] [2000]

Story: Alexander (Sacha) Luzhin, a disheveled and erratic chess master [reminiscent of the main character, musical genius in SHINE] arrives at a resort in the Italian Lakes to compete in the world chess championships. He had visited the same resort many years earlier with his cold and distant parents who we meet in frequent flashbacks. Childhood memories disturb Luzhin during his stay. Among the guests at the resort is the beautiful Natalia (Watson), hounded by her mother (Geraldine James) to the search for a class perfect husband. Believing the handsome Stassard (Christopher Thompson) is the perfect candidate, Natalia's mother is horrified when she pursues a relationship with Luzhin after he spontaneously declares his love for her and he proposes marriage to her across a fence at a tennis court. As the final contest of the chess tournament approaches, Luzhin's treacherous former mentor Valentinov (Stuart Wilson) arrives at the resort and plots to destroy his game; and, indeed, his life.

Alexander's complicated relationships with Natalia, his parents and his mentor are all explored in the movie. But only one is explored to a satisfactory level -- his relationship with chess itself. The movie is reduced by some flawed stereotypes such as the villainous Valentinov and the society-obsessed mother. These distract from what is essentially a dark story of humans using each other as pawns in a game. Also on the negative side of the ledger is the absurd inaccuracey of the Lanc Hid (Chain Bridge) juxtaposed with the Millenium Park in Budapest, Hungary. The two places are several miles apart but in THE LUZHIN DEFENCE, Director Gorris changes the city for the sake of a departure shot. That' simply not honest.

On the positive side, the rhythms of Vladimir Nabokov's prose (in a screenplay by Peter Berry) conveys the the sad, sometimes comic, story. Luzhin's White Russian emigre class are a people so cultivated and refined that wherever they travel they feel at home. But for poor Luzhin, his crippling by neuroses will not allow him to participate in this life. Turturro, as usual, is superb. He could have turned Luzhin into a highly amusing freak show, and it would have been great fun but it would have ruined the movie. He keeps Luzhin's pathos clearly in focus. We can feel the torment that Luzhin undergoes so crushingly that we must admire his noble battle to stand up to oppressors not only all around him, but from his own mind. Turturro's tenderness, even romance are not associated with any of his earlier works. It's a great performance in a hypnotic movie.

This movie is worth seeing because of its ethereal novelty and virtuoso performances by Turturro and Watson.

Chess is a fabulously complex game that no player has ever claimed to have mastered. Brilliant champions like Kasparov explain their endless fascination with the game is precisely because it is a challenge that can never be met with finality. If you pick up any basic chess book, the possible directions that are available to the two players, especially at the game's start are measured exponentially. Great players must be able to predict a variety of futures as the result of any given move they or their opponent may choose. This is demonstrated with a bit of sleight of hand of the director during one match in the film to great effect.

Luzhin is a man who is shaped both by his genius and the dysfunctional family he is the product of. Chess simultaneously defines his life, offers him shelter from those around him, and leads him to an addiction to the game that starts as eccentric and progresses to destructive. This is not a story of yet another person of extraordinary talent who also is socially dysfunctional because of his genius. His childhood and his early life are what he must form a defence against. Chess becomes a scapegoat for all the problems he sees around him as a youth. He does not have talent; rather he sees the harm he appears to inflict by constantly defeating his father at the game. His mentor and coach become no more than the means by which he is exploited.

His relationship with Emily Watson's character is appropriate as she too is considered wildly unconventional by the standards of her parents, although primarily by her mother. She is also the target of constant criticism, her life a sequence of interferences by her mother, an overbearing anti-Semitic nuisance of a person.

The close of the film initially left me disappointed. However after letting a day pass it actually becomes poignant if you are willing to stretch a bit for it. Director Marleen Gorris does s very good job of portraying the story on the screen. How much justice she does the book, as I mentioned I can not say.