“Life is hard. It seems to many of us dull and hopeless; but yet we must admit that it goes on getting clearer and easier, and it looks as though the time were not far off when it’ll be full of happiness.” For her latest project, commissioned by Arte and starring members of the Comédie-Française, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi shot an idiosyncratic, half-modernized adaptation of one of Chekhov’s greatest, most expansively melancholy plays. The three sisters of the title—two unmarried, one unhappily married—congregate in their family’s ancestral house and, along with the additional soldiers, debtors, pensioners, and spouses who populate the play, struggle to give their futures a shape.
