The Lady With the Little Dog

Much to the surprise of the Mosfilm commissars, art movie buffs throughout the world took this low-key Chekhov adaptation to their hearts. An impossible love affair begins on a Black Sea holiday, and continues in snatched and furtive meetings, encounters at the theatre, and so on. Heifits' palpable nostalgia for turn-of-the-century manners and styles invests the melancholy tale with astonishing undercurrents of emotion. Until Mikhalkov made his Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, this was by far the best Chekhov movie in Soviet cinema.