The Defense

Release date:September 8, 2000

Directed by:Marleen Gorris

Rated:

Runtime:109 minutes

The Luzhin Defence is a 2000 film directed by Marleen Gorris, starring John Turturro and Emily Watson. The film centres on a mentally tormented chess grandmaster and the young woman he meets while competing at a world-class tournament in Italy. The screenplay was based on the novel The Defense by... Vladimir Nabokov. Emily Watson received best actress nominations at the British Independent Film Awards and the London Film Critics Circle Awards. It's the early 1920s and Aleksandr Ivanovich 'Sascha' Luzhin , a gifted but tormented chess player, arrives in a Northern Italian city to compete in an international chess competition. Prior to the tournament he meets Natalia Katkov and he falls in love with her almost immediately. She in turn finds his manner to be appealing and they begin to see each other in spite of her mother's disapproval. Competing alongside Luzhin in the championship is Dottore Salvatore Turati , who is approached by Leo Valentinov , a Russian, who is Luzhin's former chess tutor from pre-revolutionary Russia.
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A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and... in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century. Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the works of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history. The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements , a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western market of fiction. The separation of a field of histories from a field of literary fiction fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.
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