The Kreutzer Sonata

Rose made a so-so version of Anna Karenina a few years back as well as a biopic about the composer of The Kreutzer Sonata , and he brings Tolstoy and Beethoven together in this version of the former's controversial novel of pathological jealousy, which circulated in what we'd now call a samizdat version as a result of tsarist censorship. Shifted from late 19th-century Russia to present-day Hollywood, it's the second of a low-budget trilogy of Tolstoy stories set in California and starring Danny Huston. In this case he plays a rich philanthropist convinced his beautiful wife, a former pianist, is having an affair with a handsome Japanese-American violinist. It's consistently and coldly erotic, and omits Tolstoy's cranky ideas on marriage and sexual abstinence without putting anything comparable in their place. It is, I'm afraid, inferior to the veteran Soviet director Mikhail Schweitzer's 1987 version which has an outstanding performance by Oleg Yankovsky. This cross between egocentric monster and pitiful Othello seriously grapples with the contradictions of Tolstoy's story.