Taken from the play by Anton Chekhov, The Seagull tells of the damatic comparison between two different ways of conceiving life and art. Trigorin, a young writer from the country, is incapable of fulfilling his ambitions, whilst his actress mother and her lover, also a writer, have been successful. What will he choose? To compromise or to die? Marco Bellocchio says he found the same themes in the play he had explored 12 years before in Fists in the Pocket: madness, envy and impotent rage. The story is used by Bellocchio really to reflect his own ideas: "the images seems to be fixed. arranged in a rhythm that is purpoely not involving, as if I wanted to keep them distant." (Ken Wlaschin, Lodon Film Festival)