In 1957 Vladimir Nabokov wrote "Lolita", which is now regarded by many as the second greatest English-language novel of the 20th century (after "The Great Gatsby"). But Nabokov was also Russian emigrant, who was a very well-regarded novelist in his own country and his own language before he was chased out of Russia by the Communists and out of Europe by the Nazis. English-language filmmakers have struggled to adapt his brilliant but controversial novel over the years. The great Stanley Kubrick was not entirely successful, and the hack Adrian Lyne probably shouldn't have tried. So it seems encouraging that Russia might attempt to reclaim a native son and one of the great Russian authors by doing their own adaptation of "Lolita". This movie unfortunately though is pretty much a travesty.
I have to cast around to find anything good to say about this. It does put back in the sex that the earlier adaptations were (understandably) quite coy and circumspect about, but the problem is it takes out pretty much everything else and turns the whole thing into basically a softcore porn film. The whole narrative of the book is largely dispensed with so that it is reduced to just a ridiculous sex fantasy about a male lodger who comes to room with a widow and her young daughter and has a whole lot of sex with both of them. The end.
Before anyone gets too worked up though, the young "Lolita" in this version (called "Alice" here) is not the 12-year-old girl in the novel or even the more mature 15-year-old actresses that played the part in the two movies (Sue Lyon and Dominique Swain). The actress here, Valeria Nemchenko, when she loses her pig tails and baby-doll dresses, is obviously about 20, so this is not so much unwholesome as it is just, boring and pointless. Yeah, Nemchenko is quite attractive, and most males probably won't mind watching her have sex, but she literally does so for at least 30 minutes of the running time. There are also some graphic sex scenes with the mother, Olga (Marina Zasimova), who unfortunately looks a lot more like Shelley Winters (from the Kubrick movie) than Melanie Griffith (from the Lyne). And suffice, it to say that, like with most softcore porn, once the sex scenes start they just don't stop right up until the ending, which is both unbelievable and unbelievably stupid. This is pretty much just a porno parody of the great novel.
