Screenwriter/producer Mary Bing penned a fine cinematic adaptation of Anton Chekhov's 1891 novella about a young antihero aristocrat (Andrew Scott) who arrives at a rundown coastal resort in the Caucasus with his mistress (Fiona Glascott) and picks a fight with a Darwinian scientist (Tobias Menzies). And when her original choice for director — Werner Herzog! — balked at this story of nude women, men at ideological loggerheads, a very public nervous breakdown, and pistols, proclaiming Chekhov unfit for cinema, she turned to Georgian director Dover Koshashvili (Late Marriage). What also makes this worthwhile is the sumptuous photography (by Atom Egoyan collaborator Paul Sarossy) and the performances by Brits Scott and Menzies as the duelists and Ireland's Glascott as the pistol who sets things off.
