The Luzhin Defence

A lakeside hotel in Italy, 1929. The chess master Alexander Luzhin arrives for a world championship match. He is dishevelled, absent, so far inside the game that he cannot dress himself. At the hotel he meets Natalia, whose family want her married to money and who chooses this strange man instead. The match runs on one side while Luzhin's childhood comes back on the other: how the tutor who taught him chess used him, and the fact that the tutor is still around. Two calculations advance at once. Marleen Gorris directs, adapting Vladimir Nabokov's novel, with John Turturro as Luzhin and Emily Watson as Natalia. A hundred and nine minutes. Nabokov's book was itself built like a game of chess; the film turns it more into a love story.