![]() Petersburg, seems much more tongue in cheek (and it is here that the moments of inventive dark satire occur). Similarly Barthes doesn't seem quite sure which route to take - the first half seems serious (and fails as a dramatic engine), while the second half, and especially when the film moves to St. This yin/yang of drama/dark comedy is at odds with itself as some of the more absurd moments derail any dramatic value. From this premise the film flitters around, allowing for a nice bit of satire when the Russian mob gets involved in the soul selling business but while watchable, I was neither grinning from the dark humor, nor glued to the chair by any kind of drama. Giamatti perceives that he is so weighed down by the heaviness of his own soul that he decides to replace his with the soul of a Russian Poet (all the better to get inside his role of Vanya, he surmises). The fresh idea of the film (which I wish could have been better handled) has to do with the ability to extract the soul from a human body (and replace it with someone else's if desired). Of course the above little asides are the kind of wry, sarcastic humor that this pseudo satire cashes in on, but for me, the satiric moments were too few and came only after slogging through some tedious bits of unimaginative setup and scenes that were meant to be funny (in that satiric kind of way) but simply weren't as far as I'm concerned. ![]() if I see another revival of Vanya or Cherry Orchard I'm going to slit my wrists or read some Russian Poetry, whichever kills me first!). ha ha ha).Īs we enter into the world of first time writer/director Sophie Barthes we see Giamatti struggling to find the right "voice" for Uncle Vanya (and somehow I wonder why it is that Chekov still gets all the juice on the boards. In a Kaufmanesque concept (see Being John Malkovich), Paul Giamatti plays a film version of himself (and gee, he's pretty good at it. Another interesting idea lags under the weight of its own cinematic soul.
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