The Tempest (2010)
Dec. 19th, 2010 05:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersWell, I'll be wanting to see this one again.
Update: Okay, now that I've had something to eat, here are some actual thoughts about the film. Perhaps above all, Miranda and Ferdinand are vivid and appealing in a way they have never been for me before as the innocent young lovers. Mirren is powerful as Prospera, and yet at times I wondered if the anger other characters say they feel from her is more in the text than in the performance. Prospera is more melancholy and stern than angry in this version. Speaking of which, the cast is pretty much perfect from stem to stern.
There are some major cuts, especially in the final act. The wedding masque is gone, replaced by a beautiful piece of symbolic astral animation that still feels a little abrupt on first viewing. Yet despite cuts and modifications, this is true to the play. So much so that in some ways it doesn't feel like a Julie Taymor film. Or maybe that's because there are no puppets.
As an interpretation, I guess the other thing that stuck out for me was Prospera's relationship with Ariel, which is tender and sweet, except for the scene where Ariel demands freedom and Prospera rebukes him/her. (Ariel is depicted as a sort of sexless hermaphrodite.) But on that level, this version wasn't as good as the live version I saw last year at showing Ariel pushing Propero toward forgiveness in the end. That scene, in itself, plays very well here, but Prospera seems more sympathetic from the get-go than you need to feel a real conversion.
Djimon Hounsou's Caliban is also fascinating -- almost moreso visually than as a performance, although his performance is very fine too. He is a patched, piebald creature -- a black man-monster with patches of white and one blue eye. One of the best interpolations in the film is a silent exchange of glances between Caliban and Prospera as they part at the end.
I'll have to see it again to digest it further. It's full of beautiful intimacies and cold distances. The heavy metal guitar chords are jolting in more ways than one. Does it modernize the play, or does it lend it newly pearly eyes? It's a live act of interpretation and embodiment, gritty and eccentric, lyric and layered. I think there's something there to chew on.
Update: Okay, now that I've had something to eat, here are some actual thoughts about the film. Perhaps above all, Miranda and Ferdinand are vivid and appealing in a way they have never been for me before as the innocent young lovers. Mirren is powerful as Prospera, and yet at times I wondered if the anger other characters say they feel from her is more in the text than in the performance. Prospera is more melancholy and stern than angry in this version. Speaking of which, the cast is pretty much perfect from stem to stern.
There are some major cuts, especially in the final act. The wedding masque is gone, replaced by a beautiful piece of symbolic astral animation that still feels a little abrupt on first viewing. Yet despite cuts and modifications, this is true to the play. So much so that in some ways it doesn't feel like a Julie Taymor film. Or maybe that's because there are no puppets.
As an interpretation, I guess the other thing that stuck out for me was Prospera's relationship with Ariel, which is tender and sweet, except for the scene where Ariel demands freedom and Prospera rebukes him/her. (Ariel is depicted as a sort of sexless hermaphrodite.) But on that level, this version wasn't as good as the live version I saw last year at showing Ariel pushing Propero toward forgiveness in the end. That scene, in itself, plays very well here, but Prospera seems more sympathetic from the get-go than you need to feel a real conversion.
Djimon Hounsou's Caliban is also fascinating -- almost moreso visually than as a performance, although his performance is very fine too. He is a patched, piebald creature -- a black man-monster with patches of white and one blue eye. One of the best interpolations in the film is a silent exchange of glances between Caliban and Prospera as they part at the end.
I'll have to see it again to digest it further. It's full of beautiful intimacies and cold distances. The heavy metal guitar chords are jolting in more ways than one. Does it modernize the play, or does it lend it newly pearly eyes? It's a live act of interpretation and embodiment, gritty and eccentric, lyric and layered. I think there's something there to chew on.
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 01:17 am (UTC)Uh, anyway, I thought of that movie a few times.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 01:27 am (UTC)I got stuck on it being called "The Cell", because it was the stairs to Prospera's cell that first made me think of it.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 01:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-20 05:16 am (UTC)