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Reviews & Ratings for
 Dark Eyes More at IMDbPro »Oci ciornie (original title)

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25 out of 26 people found the following review useful:
sublime Marcello Mastroianni, 26 December 2002
Author: Sun-Hyoung Kim from Coventry, England

I consider this movie a masterpiece. The performance of Marcello Mastroianni is simply sublime, one of the best I have ever seen from anyone, anywhere. Yes, the surface plot is about adultery, but the story is much more than that. I think this is a story about a man, an old man near the end of his life, looking back on his playboy, vagabond, good-for-nothing life, regretting it, but not knowing any other way to live. "Mother's lullaby and the Russian mist" is all he remembers about his own life, he says. Watch this old man cry, and it stirs you with all kinds of emotions and thoughts, makes you think about how you should live, that tragedy happens everyday, to every small man who must fend for himself and fail. You tell yourself you will never be like him, you pity him, disrespect him, despise him, but in the end you understand this man in the most profound sense. And you will never be able to forget that Russian mist either. Superb.

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16 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
Truly Mikhalkov's, 20 September 2004
Author: Yulia (yulenko) from Kiev, Ukraine

It's a movie in the best Mikhalkov's manner: simple but deep; funny and serious; a Russian picture with (this time) Italian colors; and as always, about the deepest depth of a Russian soul. Some may say, Mikhalkov's movies are of universal things - true, but they always touch something deeply Russian. Waiting ... love ... faith ... sincerity. When all that meets in one point, harmony and happiness come; when at least one element is missing, ... Romano comes. With all the consequences. Mikhalkov reminded me again - we live by the consequences of our actions. (i need to add a bit - they asked for the 10th line here :) BUT quantity is not quality!)

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9 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Raucous reception at Sisoev., 24 June 2004
Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States

There are many wondrous qualities to this movie, especially the performance of Marcello Mastroianni. I only want to mention one scene, my favorite. It occurs when Romano (Mastroianni) arrives by train in the Russian village of Sisoev where he is to set up a glass factory.

Upon de-training all he sees is a peasant woman with a cow. Suddenly, on the other side of the tracks a band plays. Romano walks across the welcome-carpet to a crowd of townspeople giving him a raucous reception. Actually folks here want the factory for themselves . The Italian is offered Russian bread to sample. Young girls bear doves and present the man with wreaths. The mayor recites a poem and gives a welcome speech. A medal is bestowed. Kisses galore are planted.

Singers and balalaika players appear. Caviar and lethal vodka is thrust upon the man, who is barely able to cope with its potency. It's a distillation (pun intended) of Russian-ness which overwhelms the guest as he is conducted by carriage to his hotel and carried in, tired and soused, later muttering "Sabatchka," the name of the little dog belonging to Anna, the Russian girl that has aroused his passion. Great, great!

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8 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
A Tragi-comic Tour de Force, 5 September 2005
8/10
Author: holdie from United States

Based (loosely) on Chekhov's story "The Lady With The Little Dog," Oci Ciornie (Dark Eyes) features some of the most sumptuous photography of recent years. Set in Yalta, a sultry Black Sea spa for stylish Russian idlers, Dark eyes features a memorable tragic-comic performance by Marcello Mastroianni as Romano, foolish, gallant, ultimately trivial, and a superbly innocent, deeply moving performance by Yelena Safonova as the woman whom he utterly, shamefully fails. Mikhalkov's script departs from the Chekhov story in ways that some Chiekhov-loving viewers might balk at. But Chekhov's ending is perhaps too subtle and introspective for cinematic realization, and Mikhalkov's alternative, seems justified, if only as a vehicle for Matroianni's extraordinary performance.

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8 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Best Of Breed, 21 June 2005
8/10
Author: writers_reign

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Whether this movie is based on, inspired by or just bears a passing resemblance to Chekhov's The Lady With The Little Dog is ultimately academic because what really matters is the movie as it stands, is it good, bad or ho-hum. It's actually rather good if anybody asks you. Sure, there are things that verge on hat of the very oldest kind, like the O'Henryish ending but the film transcends stuff like that easily. It begins with our old friend the Frame narrator buttonholing a passenger on a small cruise ship and laying his life-story on him. The information ladled out by the passenger - despite advancing years he is newly married; he had loved and pursued his wife for years; she in turn was unhappily married and could never love him but finally consented to marry him - over the length of the film is done so cunningly that only the professional film/story analyst will even sense a connection between this and the story told by Marcello Mastroianni, architect manque, married to Miss Gotrocks in the shape of Silvana Mangana, who is seized without warning by a passion for a Russian woman encountered by chance, so much so that he pursues her to her homeland and perseveres in the face of a burocray not unlike that encountered by Melvyn Douglas in HIS attempt to be reunited with Ninotchka, until he is finally able to travel to her small home town. The style is a hybrid of Chekhovian spareness and Visconti opulence but even this seems appropriate for a film determined to charm and seduce the discriminating viewer. Does it succeed? What do you think.

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7 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Simply, the most beautiful looking picture of modern times, 17 April 2008
10/10
Author: adipocea from Constanta, Romania

There's no really much you can say and analyze about this movie. It's not a movie by itself, it's a piece of art lost in the ocean of mundane cinema of the 20-th century. It's like the great literature, the great paintings of history, impregnated with a mystical and hard to define quality in it's texture. For me this is not simply a "movie", i say it again. Like Nostalghia or Andrei Rubliov of Tarkovsky , here the poetics transcends what we usually call cinema, or a film, because it gets a life on it's own, and becomes independent to critical observation. It's like a tiger in the Siberian forest, that you have to simply admire. A tiger is beautiful because it's a tiger, Oci Ciornie it's beautiful because it is Oci Ciornie. Something divine happened to Mihalkov and to the cast when thy made this piece of art. It was the greatest shame and scandal when the jury at Cannes awarded "Sous le Ciel de Satan" the Palme D'or, but who cares...Time is for the art what is for the wine. The good one gets better, the cheap one gets sour and becomes vinegar.

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5 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
A pure delight, 30 May 2008
10/10
Author: bklyn-boylan from United States

Yes, its story is an old chestnut. There's an excuse for Marcello Mastroianni to tell a story about himself and a Russian woman, and he does it, and there's an aftermath. But the story is so good and so well told (and acted and directed) that the device is like an old friend. This is one of Mikhailkov's best, right up there with Burnt by the Sun. It draws on Heifetz's Lady with a Dog (and Chekhov's short story too, for that matter) and parodies (or pays homage to) Fellini's 8 1/2--both just right for this Italo-Russian piece about Italians and Russians, which I found a pure delight. It revels in both poking fun of and warmly enjoying both Italian and Russian types and moods. For me, there was the additional pleasure of seeing Innokenti Smoktunovsky, who played the title role in Kozintsev's Hamlet, now middle-aged and as fine an actor as ever. Will it ever be released on DVD? It's about time this one is rediscovered.

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6 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
A vapid middle-aged Italian crosses paths with an earnest young Russian woman, 6 September 2001
Author: Philippe Ranger from Montreal, Canada

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

An Italian who cannot afford to take anything seriously (as by now he is little more than an ornament in the life of his countess wife) meets a young, married Russian woman at a spa, where she is alone (and living on short funds). Not meaning to, he causes her to fall in love with him (rather than simply to bed him, as would be the usage at the spa). He realizes this when she returns to Russia and her husband. He then sets out on the one serious undertaking of his life, meeting her again in Russia. For her part, she has realized that he could only be what he is, and in any case she lives as a correct married lady. So the enterprise leads to nothing -- except that the Italian loses the taste for standing for his wife's husband, and winds up, appropriately, as a waiter on a ferry. Extremely memorable.

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7 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Mikhalkov takes "Lady with the Dog" to logical conclusion., 1 February 1999
Author: Laurie Elliot (jelliot@infoaomori.ne.jp) from Ajigasawa, Japan

At first it seemed a terribly slow start. This was exacerbated by our mistaken notion that "Oci Ciornie" was just another title for "Urga" - we kept wondering when and how they would ever get to Mongolia in that boat!

However, once we'd determined the actual story line the dilatory beginning seemed somehow apropos. Did Mikhalkov really mean to show us the emptiness of adultery? Or is he just an astute observer of the human condition? The parallels to the 1960 B&W "Lady with the Dog" (Russian) were striking. Especially the watermelon scene. But "Dark Eyes" takes the story further and carries the theme to its logical conclusion. My daughters hated it - they prefer stories of fidelity. But I did think it was refreshing for a film to come nearer the truth for a change. Adultery is not that fulfilling.

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handsome European period piece has charm to spare, 12 November 2010
8/10
Author: Michael Neumann from United States

A Russian/Italian co-production sounds like an uneasy marriage of mismatched temperaments, but 'Dark Eyes' is a remarkably cohesive mutual effort offering the best of both worlds: a wonderfully romantic story, a healthy love of laughter and high spirits, and a lingering air of Slavic melancholy. It's being sold as a showcase for the perennial charm of Marcello Mastroianni, but the film has more than just his performance to recommend it. The script, condensed from several tales by Anton Chekhov, has the elegant simplicity of a classic short story, following a charming but buffoonish husband in his pursuit of an attractive young Russian back to her native country, where he discovers a nation of people even crazier than he is. Some of the smaller roles have been drawn for the broadest effect, but under Nikita Mikhalkov's meticulous direction every character emerges as a full blooded human being, with Mastroianni himself offering a sensitive portrait of a man too in love with life to take it seriously. A nagging reservation: the final irony revealed in the epilogue adds one coincidence too many, and comes close to spoiling the already poignant mood. Just pretend it never happened.

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