Raphael Nadjari's debut feature, The Shade, is not the first time that Dostoyevsky`s short story The Gentle One has been brought to the screen. Robert Bresson, who turned to Dostoyevsky for thematic material on two different occasions, directed the acclaimed Une Femme Douce with Dominique Sandra in the title role. Stanislav Barabas showed up at the 1968 Karlovy Vary film festival with a poignant Slovak version, after which he used this film as his calling card at West German TV stations when he departed Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion.

And Polish director Robert Glinka recently adapted the Dostoyevsky classic to current conditions in post-communist times.

"It was a book I had read a long time ago," says Raphael Nadjari. "Dostoyevsky really sets the standards of film noir. In The Gentle One I found all the ingredients of this genre. It's a very dark story, where destiny is the central theme." Queried as to why he shifted the setting for the story from Moscow to the Spanish-speaking Harlem section of New York rather than Paris, Nadjari had a ready and rather convincing answer: "Because New York has a lot of similarities with Moscow in the Russian 19th century. The story is really possible here. You don't have pawnbrokers in Paris."

To get a feel for urban America, Nadjari sat with cinematographer Laurent Brunet during pre-production and watched such movies as Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker, Sean Penn's The Crossing Guard and Louis Malle's Atlantic City. But this remains a fairly faithful adaptation, and only a few changes were made from the literary classic. Simon (Richard Edson), who sits alone in his apartment consumed with grief after his wife, Anna (Lorie Marino), commits suicide, is a Jewish pawnbroker instead of the Orthodox Christian in the original.

"To have a Russian type in New York, you need a Jew," says Nadjari. "But there are no other major changes. I just shot what was already in the book." Ron Holloway