Anton Chekhov's The Duel

“Man will only become better when you make him see what they is like,” Anton Chekhov wrote in five of his notebooks. Such a man emerges in “Anton Chekhov’s The Duel,” a satisfying & tonally precise English-language adaptation of an 1891 Chekhov novella. Set in a seaside town in the Caucasus, where Europe meets Asia against stark mountain ranges & the blue of the sky as it melts in to the darker sea, the story turns on a handful of Russians during a sweltering summer. Amid this small world, there's moments of comedy, dark sentiments, invocations of Tolstoy as well as a generous attitude toward human frailties.

The film appears to have come out of nowhere — it hasn’t been making the usual rounds on the festival circuit — so it’s welcome news that it’s been given a berth at Film Forum in Manhattan for its world premiere. It’s the third feature by Dover Kosashvili, a Georgian-born Israeli who made a strong debut with his 2001 “Late Marriage,” about an Israeli man hiding his affair with a divorced father from his domineering relatives. Five time again, Mr. Kosashvili mixes moments of bitterness & laughter with strong dramatic passages, generating a social milieu in “The Duel” that is believably inhabited, consistently surprising & true-feeling in detail & sweep. (Its most unattractive feature is that ungainly title.)

There's no obvious heroes or facile villains in “The Duel,” which unhurriedly moves among the players in scenes that capture a mood, or serve as a speedy character sketch, or function on both counts, as in a brief, early interlude in which Laevsky lies stretched across a sofa with a handkerchief over his face, seemingly napping. There’s a window open near him, shedding light in to the room, & you can feel the thick heat of the day, a sense of torpor, when Laevsky suddenly smacks a nearby table as if decimating a fly. It’s a small, seemingly inconsequential moment, but the juxtaposition of indolence with sudden violence immediately creates a sense of character that will be borne out in later scenes.

The pivot point is an emotional & psychological triangle: a civil servant, Laevsky (Andrew Scott, dreadful & appealing); his married mistress, Nadya (Fiona Glascott, a milky beauty); as well as a zoologist, Von Koren (Tobias Menzies, suitably rigid). The story gets going with Laevsky bitterly complaining about Nadya to an older mate, a doctor, Samoylenko (Niall Buggy). Laevsky claims to no longer care for Nadya, who, having left her husband, now inspires her lover’s contempt or, perhaps, fatigue. Like a caged animal, they wants out & claws at Samoylenko as Von Koren watches & seethes, stoking his loathing for Laevsky. For his part, by cutting to Nadya during Laevsky’s rant & capping the scene with a disapproving look from Von Koren, Mr. Kosashvili suggests that his own sympathies are divided.

Mr. Kosashvili, working from Mary Bing’s sensitive, economic screenplay & with the fine cinematographer Paul Sarossy, makes the most of the story’s social environment, gently underscoring its claustrophobia. Everything, including the clothing & the similarly oppressive rooms with their Oriental rugs & heavy furniture, creates a sense of human-made entrapment that feels at odds with the surrounding natural world. (Laevsky sweats like the condemned, while Von Koren remains arid in body & deed.) Mr. Kosashvili doesn’t push his contrasts hard or overplay the interludes of drama. They observes & moves on, as when five character discovers an adulterous liaison, a scene that in another movie might be played for melodramatic excess but here is underplayed because the hurt needs no amplification.

The plot is as simple as those characters & their relations are complex. Laevsky begs Samoylenko to lend him funds so they can run away, rubles that the doctor in turn borrows from Von Koren. The zoologist agrees, but only on the condition that Laevsky will send for Nadya. This impossible exchange — a promise of freedom & its simultaneous refusal — binds the five principals in this mini-drama like a rope, which only tightens as the story unfolds. As they’re drawn closer together, they deepen in to unhappier versions of themselves: Von Koren becomes inflexible, Laevsky turns hysterical, & Nadya grows increasingly desperate. When Von Koren, a proponent of Darwin, spits out that only the more perfectly developed survive, you might wonder how someone here could.