Of the major Chekhov plays, The Cherry Orchard, which is set on the estate of a bankrupt aristocrat whose beloved orchard is doomed to go under the ax as soon as her land is sold, would seem to be the most conducive to filming. And Michael Cacoyannis’s version does include glorious panoramas of the orchard (shot by Aris Stavrou), but just about everything else goes wrong. Cacoyannis’s other attempts to put drama on the screen adapted the tragedies of his countryman Euripides, whose spirit he understood instinctively. He seems lost in Chekhov, and so do most of the actors, who wander about as if they were sleepwalking.

The movie is crippled at the outset by an egregious casting error. As Ranevskaya, the heroine, the eternally elegant Charlotte Rampling wears smashing gowns, but she’s dead in the eyes, and her acting is a series of painfully strained posturings. The cast also features Owen Teale as the nouveau riche Lopakhin, Katrin Cartlidge and Tushka Bergen as Ranevskaya’s daughters, Andrew Howard as a dour, sarcastic Trofimov, and Xander Berkeley (far more at home as a CIA-type bureaucrat on TV’s 24) as the foolishly amorous Yepikhodov, but none of them is much good. Alan Bates plays Ranevskaya’s brother, Gayev, with a quicksilver quality that might work with a better director, and in his final scenes he comes through with a new depth and gravity. But the best work is done by actors in small supporting roles: Michael Gough, his whispery voice filtered through a mass of facial hair, as the antique servant Feers; apple-cheeked Melanie Lynskey as the servant girl Dunyasha; and Ian McNeice in a Dickensian turn as the financially burdened but eternally cheerful Pishchik. The movie’s rhythms are weary and attenuated except when one of these performers is on screen.