Cinema: Oft-Told Tale

The Overcoat. In Nikolai Gogol's short story, as in this brief and virtually flawless film from Russia, Akaky Akakievich is a hunched, squinty-eyed penpusher, ridiculed at his office, who all winter long must suffer the cold winds of St. Petersburg whipping through his gauze thin overcoat. Compelled to buy a new one at painful cost, he talks to it, sleeps with it, defends it against a threatening moth. Next day, miraculously, Akaky Akakievich and his overcoat create a sen sation at work. His former tormentors are now backslapping friends; he is even invited to a champagne party. But on the way home that night, ruffians accost Akakievich, steal his coat and with it his reason for existence. Again friendless, the cipher succumbs to madness and death; yet his ghost remains, seizing the coat collars of stolid St. Petersburgers to remind them that humanity is more than appearances.

Roland Bykov, best known in Russia as a stage director, is perfectly cast as Akakievich, and Aleksei Batalov, who was an actor in such films as Nine Days of One Year and The Cranes Are Flying, directs the film as a memorable character portrait, faithful in spirit and exquisite in detail. Looking like a wistful hand-carved troll, Bykov is gently hilarious when he first ventures out to show off his coat, cautiously dodging snowflakes, and ineffably tragic later as he stumbles through the white night mourning his loss at every window. Everything is right with The Overcoat, except that its literal old-fashioned excellence may seem so familiar that moviegoers will mistake it for a revival. Earlier film versions of Gogol's story include The Last Laugh, a German silent classic starring Emil Jannings, and The Bespoke Overcoat, British Director Jack Clayton's Oscar-winning short of 1956. It is rewarding, apparently, to remake a durable Overcoat.