Occasionally they bust loose long enough to raise an enigmatic eyebrow or two. They are part of an enigma - the enigma of life, I reckon - and are held tightly in rein. We have met the whole crew already in Dostoevski, and we're waiting for Schell to DO something with them, but we're out of luck. Schell works his camera for all it's worth, giving us the usual assortment of visitors to the Russian countryside, tea parties, fading countesses, eccentric cigar-smoking doctors and hangers-on and soįorth. Isn't first love always? At this point the decent thing to do would be to get on with Second Love, but no, we have to sit through the slow unfolding of the tragedy. The sound track breaks out in joyous music, and right away we know, that this is First Love, and also (because we have been here before) that it is doomed. It is the lovely Zinaida, playing lawn tennis with that sweatless perfection that only aristocrats seem to approach. The story involves young Alexander, who is walking through the woods one day when zap! an apparition appears before him. In his directing debut, Maximilian Schell has taken a Turgenev story and stretched it out with silence, vast characterless landscapes, plenty of birds, some solitude and a visual style that doesn't help much. The problem in "First Love" (apart from the fact that the conclusion in no way emerges organically from the material) is that the whole movie is so smug in its sense of tragedy.
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