Kasaba (1997)

English title: The Small Town.

While this is generally considered to be based on an original screenplay, excerpts ('alintilar' is the word that appears in the final credits) from Anton Chekhov were used in the film's dialogue; from what I deduced from some websites, they are from The Cherry Orchard (written in 1903), but I could not verify that.

A family consisting of three generations of men and women live in a small town. An old man who recollects his time in the war; his wife; his son who went abroad to study but returned without having really made something of his life; his wife; his orphaned nephew who can't hold a job and dreams of going abroad; a boy and a girl, children of the younger couple. The film consists of several sequences in town and in the neighboring woods: a classroom where the girl studies; a cemetery where she and her brother go to pick plums; a funfair; and the film's pièce-de-résistance: a picnic in the woods where they talk about nothing and everything.

Occasionally interesting, not badly filmed, a little disjointed overall.

Rating: 43