I expect for one to enjoy a romantic melodrama
you have to care about the characters. I can't say I did. Adapted from Nabokov,
it is missing that certain element that makes you want for these people to
end up together. That is quite preposterous really. Emily Watson plays the
daughter of an upper class family who finds herself on vacation where a chess
tournament is taking place circa the late 1920's. There she finds herself
drawn to a totally mentally broken chess player (John Turturro) who can barely
put a sentence together, has no ability to care about anything but chess
and who is a total bore. But she falls in love with him and he with her and
my basic reaction was - why? Really why? He is basically a milder nicer version
of Bobby Fischer - unable to relate to the real world and it to him. I read
somewhere that the final chess solution in the film is in reality quite brilliant.
It may possibly have been derived from Nabokov who created these chess puzzles
and was quite a fine player.
