I can think of no filmmaker (with the possible exception of the Brothers Quay) who could successfully transfer The Defense--Vladimir Nabokov's third and most cerebral Russian novel--from text into moving, speaking images. The novel's world, that is to say the mind world of Luzhin (the main character, whose strange name sounds like "illusion"), is populated by formulas rather than people--formulas, furthermore, that move from pattern to pattern rather than place to place. Indeed, making a film of The Defense is tantamount to dramatizing an elaborate math equation dreamed up by an eccentric professor.

So how was the Dutch director Marleen Gorris able to make a decent film out of Nabokov's least cinematic book? By not making a film about the book. Gorris' movie is not Nabokov's book. The two are very different. The movie takes place in sunny Italy, the book in gloomy Germany. The movie is about eternal love, the book is about the limits of art. The movie ends with an accidental death, the book ends with a suicide. The movie is focused on the body of a woman, the book rarely leaves the mind of a madman.

"I don't particularly know a lot about Nabokov," Marleen Gorris admits to me. This is actually a good thing. Her complete indifference to Nabokov's aesthetic strategies, impulsive wordplay, and mazelike metaphysics is what saved the film. Gorris knows that her place and role is in the world: She is a filmmaker, and as such wants to work with nothing less than the basic materials of her profession--a good script, financers with deep pockets, a few famous actors, a lush score, and a talented cinematographer.

"I read the script before I read the book. And the first thing that struck me when I read his book was the script wasn't all that close to the book; as a matter of fact, it was very far away from it. In fact, if I had read the book first, I would not have seen a movie in it. Nabokov had written a book that takes place inside of a person and hardly mentions anyone but the main character, Luzhin. This is exactly how Nabokov talks about the other people in the book: He always says things like 'the girl's father,' or 'the parent's daughter.' He hardly gives them a name. It is very, very much a book. It's not simply a story, but a journey into a nutter's mind, and it's very bleak. So it isn't all that easy to make a film of a book like that. This is why, as far as the film is concerned, I was happy with the changes made in the script."

Those who love Nabokov's novels, and are outraged when filmmakers fail to capture the master's intellectual essence on screen, must do their best to avoid this film. But those who want to watch an atmospheric film about love, sunlight, and beautiful Italian lakes will not be disappointed. Set in the year Nabokov wrote the novel, 1929, the movie opens with the Russian Grand Master, Luzhin (played by John Turturro), heading by train toward the chess world championships. Luzhin doesn't speak much, smokes too much, is clumsy, and has big holes in his pockets. He is greatly admired by those who are obsessed with chess, but considered a freak by the rest of the world.

Shortly after he arrives at the city where the competition is to be held, he meets a beautiful Russian aristocrat named Natalia (Emily Watson) and decides that she is the one he has been looking for all his life. Luckily for Luzhin, Natalia happens to be bored with the usual batch of aristocratic dandies who inevitably pursue her, and wants something a little more exciting. Luzhin takes advantage of her current dissatisfaction and a few hours after meeting her asks for her hand. Shocked--and pleased by the shock--she accepts his offer, and they fall in love. At first everything is great (sex improves Luzhin's game), but before long things fall apart because, well, Luzhin is a madman.

What most impressed me about the film is its dramatization of chess matches. I know absolutely nothing about the game, and yet during the intense chess moments I found myself recognizing as utterly brilliant this or that move made by deep-in-thought John Turturro. Another credit to the film is the pleasure of watching Emily Watson not give a powerful performance. This time around she is calm and stable, never descending below mild sadness or rising above light joy. As for Turturro, he successfully turns Nabokov's melancholy Luzhin into a dancing Charlie Chaplin.

"Though I liked the script, and thought the ending invented by the scriptwriter, Peter Berry, was brilliant, I did think a couple of things were not strong enough, like, for example, the role of the woman. I think if the film is a love story, and you have a very strong male character, then you need a strong woman or else you won't know why one bothers with the other," Marleen Gorris says, seemingly oblivious of the fact that her words, her total disregard for the integrity of the master's text, would turn the stomach of a Nabokov purist. But she is absolutely right to have made these significant changes--to stress the body and beauty of Natalia over the mind and thoughts of shabby Luzhin--because cinema is not intellectual but always and forever sensual.