The Best Defense
A drama about chess and repression scores a checkmate.

THE LUZHIN DEFENCE
With John Turturro, Emily Watson
Screenplay by Peter Berry
Based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov
Directed by Directed by Marlene Gorris

IN THE CINEMA'S FIRST psychoanalytic chess soap opera, directed by the Oscar-winning Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris (Antonia’s Line), John Turturro portrays the fictional early 20th Century Russian grand master Alexander Luzhin, who since the age of 10 has known nothing else in his life but chess.

He grew up in Czarist-era opulence, the child of a stern, wealthy father who perked up in presence of his wife’s spirited sister. This naturally disturbed Alexander’s embittered, high-strung mother, whose dead body Alexander discovers one day in the library, after which Dad farms off the lad to study chess with Valentinov (Stuart Wilson), who exploits him and makes him an international star.

Now Alexander is an adult, but barely: He’s so lonely, withdrawn and socially inept that he walks around public places gesticulating in conversation with himself and dancing with his walking stick. At a big tournament in a lovely small Italian town, he meets Natalia (Emily Watson), a well-off single Russian gal who likes books, wounded birds and oddballs, and whose pushy mother wants her to marry her off well (she has her matrimonial eye on a handsome, hand-kissing Frenchman at the tournament).

Thus the board is set for a battle of knights and neuroses: As Luzhin faces his flashy Italian competitor in the big match, his engagement to Natalia - to whom he proposes, inappropriately, just two days after they exchange a mere three or four sentences - creates a whole new set of psychological complications in his anguished mind, which can only fully comprehend the world when he speaks of chess.

This would all be routine and possibly even silly were it not for the way Gorris mounts her story and directs her impressive actors. She has a lean, cool, intimate style that’s equal parts period elegance and refreshing emotional frankness.

You won’t be surprised at the sensitive work she gets from Turturro, who even pulls his performance through those moments when he seems to be somewhat miscast. But I must confess that for the first time I fully enjoyed watching Emily Watson, the British actress whose torturous screen work ranges from painfully dour (Breaking the Waves, Angela’s Ashes) to awkwardly mannered (Trixie). She has a lucid ferocity in The Luzhin Defence, where she plays a bright, sane, rebellious young woman who soberly tells her family (and especially her mother) what she will and will not do.

Natalia’s passionate aggression in her relationship with Luzhin mirrors one of the drama’s central chess metaphors: The king, we learn, is weighed down by his pomp and circumstance, while the queen can move about the board with cunning and agility. So it goes when things get hairy in love and at play for Luzhin, whose life of privilege and emotional distance has left him trapped inside his own head, tormented by fame, genius and memories that won’t leave him alone (we learn about his childhood through flashbacks).

During the days when Luzhin toured the world giving chess exhibitions, when he was a teen-ager or barely in his 20s, he would sit blindfolded in the middle of a room surrounded by 10 opponents. An announcer would call out each opponent’s move, and Alexander would keep all 10 boards in his head and call out his own moves, whipping each of his opponents handily as the chess world’s equivalent of a performing monkey.

Gorris presents these and other moments of grand mastery with a swiftness that gives them just enough dramatic weight to grip us without bogging things down. She seems to know how to get things over with in The Luzhin Defence - the title (with its British spelling) refers to a chess strategy as well as a psychological one - although her movie really has two ending: one grim (no doubt taken from the Nabokov novel she’s adapting), and one somewhat more satisfying. No matter: Her movie is highly entertaining and gingerly wise about the need we all have to be touched by something other than the outstretched hand of the opponent you’ve just beaten at a game.