Not since Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway made soft-focus love to "Windmills Of My Mind" in the original The Thomas Crown Affair has chess looked as silly as it does in Marleen Gorris' moribund period melodrama The Luzhin Defence. In an effort to spruce up the least cinematic of games, Gorris has made it a metaphor for virtually everything, including the inevitable lovemaking montage, which climaxes as a Shostokovich waltz swells in the background and a rook advances with a mighty thrust. Naked behind all its arthouse trappings, The Luzhin Defence was adapted from Vladimir Nabokov's novel, but despite the literary cachet, it's as formulaic as any Hollywood blockbuster, like an adaptation of the trailer for Shine. Cutting a Chaplin-esque pose with a tattered suit and a cane, John Turturro plays a chess Grand Master and idiot savant whose all-consuming obsession with the game makes him a social misfit. At a luxurious resort hotel, site of the World Championships, he catches the eye of Emily Watson, an independent-minded society woman who's charmed by his eccentricities and falls in love with him over the objections of her snooty mother (Geraldine James). As he prepares for a showdown with his Italian rival, Turturro contends with his troubled past and the psychological gamesmanship of his embittered former instructor (Stuart Wilson), who abandoned the young prodigy after a losing streak. Of course, his vulnerability in the real world carries over to the game itself, where he has to come up with a defense against his opponent's attacks while having the confidence to turn the tables. Notwithstanding her high-minded intentions, Gorris sets up the big match like a prizefighting promoter, pitting pure-hearted heroes against snarling villains such as Watson's mother, who at one point drops a casual mention of "the Jewish conspiracy" at the dinner table. Meanwhile, Gorris stops the action cold with extensive use of flashbacks from Turturro's traumatic childhood, which serves as a skeleton key to his adult dysfunction, explaining all the psychology not made explicit in the dialogue. Too banal to translate Nabokov's narrative intricacies, too slow for superficial uplift, The Luzhin Defence lays dead on the screen, embalmed by each passing reel.