The latest from Kira Muratova, director of the stunning The Asthenic Syndrome, is another mordant, disturbing effort. The film extends and combines two short works by Chekhov: Difficult People, a bitter and sad sketch of provincial family life, and Tatyana Repina, in which a bridegroom is haunted by the ghost of his previous lover. The lighting in the domestic sequences is flat and harsh; in the very long wedding sequence, Muratova adopts a style reminiscent of Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador. Throughout the film, the acting and direction appear to work against Chekhov. Scenes are heavy and grotesque, not light and delicate. But Muratova is uninterested in facile, reductive ironies about the relevance of Chekhov to Russia today. Perhaps her film can best be viewed as a complex satirical tragedy, in which life and literature criticize each other at different levels. Characters fall into literary, theatrical postures and roles, as if deciding to indulge in something fattening. The priests at the wedding service aimlessly honor the dead past through reverence for the written word. And in moments of insight, characters realize that they’ve fallen out of time. In Russian with English subtitles.