New Statesman: The Gambler.

Just when arts television has lost interest in dead artists, cinema has rediscovered them. After 25 years in which only Ken Russell put creative agonies and ecstasies on screen, Van Gogh, Eliot, Miller, Strachey, Picasso, Verlaine and Wilde have all been movie heroes in the 1990s.

Film-makers have picked figures they see as honorary contemporaries, ahead of their age in lifestyle or artistic radicalism. Yet the paradoxical attraction of dramatising their lives is that they provide ready-made old-fashioned tales, usually ending with a deathbed scene or a poignant decline. Karoly Makk's The Gambler is a rarity in tracing an upward curve.

Dostoevsky (He's mad! He's modern! He's Freudian-but-somehow-existentialist!) has long fascinated film-makers. But what can you do with his novels? Settle for a period version which makes them Eugene O'Neill with patronymics, such as Hollywood's 1950s The Brothers Karamazov? Update, as with Bertolucci's Partner (based on Notes From Underground)?

Makk and his three writers go for a hybrid solution, costume drama with a twist: the original story, centering on Alexei, tutor to a family staying at a German spa, who is doubly obsessed with the Manon-esque Polina and with roulette, is intercut with the tale of its writing, in which the future Mrs D (Jodhi May), a stenographer called Anna, impels the penurious author (Michael Gambon) to complete the novella in 26 days, thus satisfying a devil's pact with his publisher.

The tactic of alternating scenes from the work and the life gives The Gambler the odd feel of a particularly plush BBC2 arts profile. It also drags Dostoevsky towards us: instead of the latter-day proleptic creator of nutty strangers, he is seen as through the postmodern eyes of Jacques Rivette or Milan Kundera, expressing their awareness of fiction's fabrications through two-tier narratives.

There are three gamblers in The Gambler: Alexei, Dostoevsky and Anna the secretary. In the invented story, Alexei risks all and loses; in the biographical story, a four-years-on prologue shows a beggar-like Anna. However, an epilogue completing that flash-forward depicts her collecting the writer from the roulette table, apparently contentedly, and tells us their wandering years produced three great novels ("Anna took dictation"). So she wins, Sort of.

All this is smart and seductive but it entails subordinating and distorting Dostoevsky's own text. An enigmatic fable in which everyone seems deranged is transformed into formulaic hack-work filled with pasteboard characters.

Cutting it up into chunks further ensures that real acting is impossible. You don't need John Wood to play Alexei's dopey employer,just any rent-a-fop; nor Polly Walker as Polina, just any old allumeuse. Only the veteran Luise Rainer has a part to relish as Wood's casino-crazed mother.

Given more scope in the roomier outer story, May winningly makes Anna an idealistic Chekhov heroine, an angel of the future rescuing the wrecked genius from mid-century paralysis. As Dostoevsky, Gambon does nothing he hasn't done before, but even Robo-Gambo is perfectly acceptable.

The film opts for having its Russians speaking unaccented English and only its Gallic tricksters sounding foreign. But it can't escape the familiar absurdities of "Europudding" co-productions: Rainer is incorrigibly German. The French parts are daftly given to non-francophones.

And, anyway, the simplification is misguided. Teaming with nationalities, tongues and currencies, The Gambler is itself a Europudding -- the first novel about Eurotrash. Dostoevsky's book is most modern in anticipating precisely the kind of cosmopolitan human paella typified by Makk's film.