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...A surprise conclusion provides a richly surprising but traditionally Russian verdict on Romano's sexual frivolity...

...she's Anna—the frail, sensitive, frustrated, and alluring "Lady with the Little Dog" from Chekov, several of whose stories have been combined to make the screenplay...

...Fortunately, like his great Russian literary grandmasters, he views irony ironically...

...In all Russian mythmaking, one must be with "the others...

...The only mistake in Baby Boom is that Keaton's child never ages...

...Kramer, then splices it wholesale with The Secret of My Success...

...Second, Director Nikita Mikhalkov has expertly mixed diverse settings to adapt the sources...

...After a while, I ached to see one thing out of place...

...the latter half is set in the woods and fields of rural (supposedly pre-revolutionary) Russia...

...When Keaton escapes to Vermont, surprise, it's autumn...

...Mikhalkov's father wrote the lyrics to the Russian national anthem, one of the few genuinely beautiful elements in the Soviet patriotic machine...

...But once Anna enters, the annoying routine of Romano's whimsy finds a fit dramatic contrast: at the spa where he runs away from his wife, he becomes Anna's knight errant...

...Mikhalkov has said that his work is influenced by Fellini, and the influence shows, sometimes destructively, in the first half of this film...

...Here, over Mikhalkov's shoulders peer not just Chekhov or Tolstoy, but Dostoevsky (with his hatred of Rome) and perhaps Solzhenitsyn (with his hatred of the West) and their common inspiration, Pushkin, who first satirized cosmopolitanism in Eugene Onegin...

...But Mikhalkov's first half seems dramatically slow, and one tires at times of the endless languors of the pre- World War One Italian upper class, the breathless glances across elegant concert rooms, and the faineant Romano with his halfhearted wenching and halfwitted buffoonery...

...add the offensive cartoon of potential adoptive parents from the Middle West...

...no one tainted by individualism can enter their kingdom...

...First, Mastroianni's co-star, Russian actress Elena Sofonova, magnificently portrays a beautiful Chekovian heroine...

...Mastroianni's versatility and the superb work of the makeup creiw saved the film at several points...

...The plot eschews girl-meets-boy (although later that, too, happens, with Sam Shepherd as a Vermont vet), for career-girl-meet-baby, hates-baby, triesto-dispose-of-baby, and finally (who could have guessed it...

...The sight of Mastroianni carrying a sheet of glass through St...

...The film raises a serious issue: a woman can, if she chooses, grittily combine motherhood and career success...

...There is no anachronism: the ecologist is named Konstantin, a stand-in for Tolstoy's hero in Anna Karenina, an earlier episode in the longstanding Russian debates about progress and "Westernization...

...Once in Russia, this film soars, no doubt because of the source of both story and screenplay...

...when he pursues her into a chicken coop next to her husband's mansion, they make wild love in a whirlwind of scattered feathers...

...Not by accident, his last sight of Anna's home town is the old wooden church from the days of the Viking Russ...

...snow falls and (mirabile dictu) the roof falls in and the heating fails...

...Mikhalkov's film, for all the notation of domestic failings and foibles, also stands in a long Russian tradition of passing judgment on things foreign...

...His own intense lyricism in and about film was first evident in the poignant Slave of Love (1976), a tragicomic tale of filmmakers during in the Red/White Civil War...

...Mikhalkov also includes a Russian ecologist who at first complains about Romano's plan to start the factory, then aids him when he realizes the Italian's real goal is true love...

...throw in the trite insults to religion...

...Explaining his inability to keep in touch with Anna, Romano declares, "This is the twentieth century...

...But the Latin lover is not able to follow impetuosity with commitment...

...The shots of this hidden world, photographed by one who loves it, are alone worth the price of several admissions...

...Romano finds Anna, who flees from him to pray before a shimmering icon...

...It isn't designed, but calibrated, a 99.9 percent pure iconographic video...

...The film's content celebrates individuality, but the style suppresses idiosyncracy at every turn...

...For all the comedy, no Russian watching the film could miss the topical references...

...The photography here isn't political but anthropological...

...When Anna runs away from him to return to a heartless husband, leaving a note explaining how she fears genuine love, Romano takes off after her, using as an excuse a scheme to start a modernized glass factory in her backward homeland...

...Start with the stereotypes of New York and Vermont (even the color patterns of sheets and furniture...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...Dressed in a sparkling white suit, he walks into a a pool of steamy mud just to retrieve her hat which has been blown away by a breeze...

...The first half of the film takes place in posh spas and villas in northern Italy, and uses veteran European stars like Sylvia Mangano as Romano's rich, stormy wife and Marthe Keller as his comically mischievous mistress...

...It's a signature gesture, symbolic not just of his flamboyance but talent for the grand gesture and gesturing...

...Such a theme deserves better than the mildly amusing treatment it gets here...

...The main dramatic interest derives from the flashback structure in which Mikhalkov sets up a much older Romano, eyes haggard and face drooping, recalling his youth and bygone naughtiness...

...falls in love with same, loses fast track job, runs away to the country, discovers true self, et cetera...

...But the film's other fine features (and one bad one) have been lost in the fuss over its superstar...

...Spring blooms and bunny rabbits play on lawns, a tulip bed sprouts...

...Back home for a divorce, he slumps his shoulders in surrender 601 to his wife and retreats again into his loveless marriage (which soon falls apart again...

...Baby Boom feminizes Dustin Hoffman's role in Kramer vs...

...Life gets desperate until Shepherd turns up...

...To avoid the appearance of a trend, Paramount has held back a similar movie, She's Having a Baby...

...it earned a Best Actor award at Cannes this year...

...Petersburg is both hilariously absurd, and, like the mud swim, richly symbolic...

...Suspicion of the foreigner is such that no officials will sign his passport to travel inland, nor explain why they will not, until a local aristocrat (played with the utter aplomb of a mini-czar by Oleg Tabakov) silently, ceremoniously, condescends to help out...

...SCREEN TERMS OF COMMITMENT 'DARK EYES' & 'BABY BOOM' Dark Eyes features a remarkable performance by Marcello Mastroianni as Romano, an aging Italian Don Juan...

...Baby Boom is so perfect an artifice that it is hard to review as a film...

...In Dark Eyes, Mikhalkov also takes a lively, bittersweet look at his native land...

...The oddity, when it became clear, fit like a glove...

...Arriving inland, Romano is greeted with muscularly literal open arms by a loud, progress-drunk marshal of the nobility, then is caroused with kvass and serenaded into a stupor by a wild gypsy band...

...Romano's first adventures provide a quirky satire on Russian tendencies to bureaucracy, bumptiousness, and bacchanal...

...Baby Boom's weird, wonderful mistake reveals that such films have less to do with the reality of parenthood than with its demography...

...This fall, other Russian films produced and relased under Gorbachev will also make their way here...

...Mikhalkov, half brother of Andrei Konchalovksy (Duet for One, Runaway Train), is one of many talented Russians directors, some of them exiles, some of them now breathing the fresh air of glasnost on home soil...

...It is hard to believe that there are landscapes as green as these anywhere on eartj...

...The problem isn't the predictability of every twist of plot but the regimentation of every petty detail into slick formula...

...It stars Diane Keaton as a super Yuppie New York business woman (first in her class at Yale, MBA at Harvard, feared as "the Tiger Lady" among investement bankers) who inherits an infant by last will and testament of her one relative...

...The film coincides with the new ABC show on Yuppie parents, Thirtysomething, and follows Raising Arizona...

...Who thinks of others...