This movie suffers of actually being too faithful to the original play. Not that the play isn't any good, it's outstanding, it's just that cinema and theater are very different mediums of storytelling: one can't just take a camera to the theater and point it at the stage. This is almost what the director has done.
In the play, the stage is divided into 3 sections: memory, reality and hallucination. Whenever the story would shift between planes, lights would go off in one section and on in another. That has a big influence on how the dialog was written and how the story moves forward. The director kept all the lines and most of the pace and just changed the different sections of the stage into merely different takes, just as if it was any other story.
This is a very unusual play, quite demanding on its actors and directors. While this production had good intentions, I think the overall result falls flat. I've just seen with my friends and two Russian guests (we saw it with English subtitles), they found the story to be interesting but the movie to be "not good".
I rate it a 6 just because of the sheer literary and dramatic strength of the play that is being adapted. If it were a different story, the rating wouldn't have been as good.
In the play, the stage is divided into 3 sections: memory, reality and hallucination. Whenever the story would shift between planes, lights would go off in one section and on in another. That has a big influence on how the dialog was written and how the story moves forward. The director kept all the lines and most of the pace and just changed the different sections of the stage into merely different takes, just as if it was any other story.
This is a very unusual play, quite demanding on its actors and directors. While this production had good intentions, I think the overall result falls flat. I've just seen with my friends and two Russian guests (we saw it with English subtitles), they found the story to be interesting but the movie to be "not good".
I rate it a 6 just because of the sheer literary and dramatic strength of the play that is being adapted. If it were a different story, the rating wouldn't have been as good.