Chekhov's nineteenth-century characters find themselves jolted into the twenty-first in this fantasy from Kira Muratova, one of Russia's premier women directors. Here sensitive students still starve to death in the winter, but now they also ride in SUVs, and preening upper-class guests still avoid vengeful ghosts at extravagant Orthodox weddings, but they can at least use cell phones. The film combines two Chekhovian stories: in one, a sensitive student struggles to overcome his overbearing father; in the other, a ghost haunts her earthly lover's wedding. The muck of Russia's agrarian past collides with the soullessness of its capitalist present; in either world, however, those who quietly use their minds are always devoured by those who loudly use their mouths. Jarring, disorienting, and frequently insane (like any great art), Chekhov's Motives achieves director Muratova's artistic ideal of cinema as “an emotional snakebite,” a pained howl that Chekhov himself would recognize and admire.