Vladimir Nabokov is perhaps best known for his novel Lolita, a tale of obsession that is foreshadowed by his earlier novel, The Luzhin Defence.
Sometimes known more simply, though less resonantly, as The Defence, it tells the story of a chess grandmaster who is all genius when it comes to the board and all ineptitude when it comes to social intercourse. The obsession of Humbert Humbert in Lolita is with a pre-teen girl; the obsession of the protagonist of The Luzhin Defence is with chess.
Director Marleen Gorris, who made a successful adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, has now translated The Luzhin Defence to the screen, and she has made a very fine job of it.
The action takes place at a hotel on the shores of Lake Como in Italy in 1928. A chess tournament is about to take place. The favourites for the top position are Alexander Luzhin (John Turturro) and Turati (the appropriately named Fabio Sartor). They could not be more different: Turati is ebullient and elegantly turned out; Luzhin is withdrawn and dishevelled. Luzhin has little in his life but chess, and no capacity for social niceties. When it comes to chess, he is ahead of everyone else, but when it comes to ordinary life he’s a non-starter. Can he be socialised without losing his genius? And if he loses his genius, and thus his obsession, what is left of him?
The chess-playing sequences are exceptionally well done for a game that rather lacks visual dynamism (it is so cerebral), but the real inner drama is happening elsewhere, as Natalia (Emily Watson), the daughter of aristocratic Russian émigrés holidaying in Italy, becomes attracted to Luzhin, and begins to take him under her wing and turn him into something more socially appropriate.
Natalia’s formidable mother (a wonderfully brittle Geraldine James), however, is deeply opposed to this budding romance, and Luzhin’s former mentor, the suavely manipulative Valentinov (a charming, sinister Stuart Wilson), has come back into Luzhin’s life — with very ambiguous intentions.
How this plays out is gripping, touching and beautifully realised. The sense of period is immaculate: Gorris finds the perfect tone for the inter-war world of rich cosmopolitan Europeans. Turturro and Watson give exact and affectingly human performances, with the squarish plainness of Watson’s face blossoming into beauty as she embarks on her mission to love and transform Luzhin.
Turturro, always an intense actor, is particularly good, bringing with him echoes of his roles in films such as the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink — that feeling of a man at an angle to the rest of the world, permanently puzzled by life. His narrow, asymmetrical face and bulging eyes are dead right for this twitchy personality haunted by the past and struggling with the present. You will feel as much sympathy for him as Natalia does.