When the writer Leonard Digges looked back from the 1630s over the recent meteor blaze that was William Shakespeare he said that it was above all Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing that pulled the crowds in: "let but Beatrice / And Benedick be seen, lo in a trice / The Cockpit galleries, boxes, all are full." The couple were still doing it at the premiere of the Shakespeare sisters' film version of the play on a chilly April evening in London in 2022, when the cinema was full to bursting and the end of the film was met with rapturous applause. The play has been a honeypot for film makers over the past three decades and the Shakespeare sisters' film seems to build on two notable predecessors: Kenneth Branagh's spectacle of 1993 and Joss Whedon's more cloistered, black and white version of 2012. The Shakespeare sisters, Hillary and Anna Elizabeth, watched the Branagh version constantly while growing up and its Italianate joie de vivre has rubbed off on their film. But Joss Whedon's contemporary version might be an even closer model because of its rigorous confinement of the action within the interior of a stylish residence in Santa Monica. The Shakespeare sisters' equivalent is a wealthy modern home in rural England, a property that might belong to someone in the City and part of a social milieu to which the protagonists seem accustomed. When the minibus of Don Pedro's rugby team breaks down, no-one in the party seems in the least surprised to walk across a field and end up on a very extended stopover at a friend's lavish home where there are Andy Warhol or baroque paintings on the walls and where one can casually drink champagne in a rooftop jacuzzi. The locale gives an external reference point to the dance of social comedy of the play and perhaps confirms its intrinsic conservatism (although there are perhaps moments where the directors probe this conservatism: at one point Benedick reads Karl Marx as he tries to understand the social masquerade unfolding around him).
One of the many admirable qualities of the Shakespeare sisters' direction is the way in which their fluid cinematic idiom weaves the characters and their manoeuvrings into this definite location and its social significations. One only needs here to point to the varied and humorous use made of the home's swimming pool in the adaptation: perhaps never before has a pool had such a central role in a Shakespearean drama! The flowing, graceful cinematic technique of the sisters also manages to put the anti-naturalism of the deception scenes-which are apt to leave modern viewers thinking "how could anyone fall for that?"-into seamless continuity with the rest of the action.
The play tells the story of two crossed couples-Hero and Claudio, Beatrice and Benedick-during a prolonged visit of Don Pedro and his entourage at the estate of Leonato, Hero's father. There are two impediments to the final union of the couples: the machination hatched by Don John, Don Pedro's illegitimate brother, to defame Hero and spite Claudio; and the more complex psychological refusals of Beatrice and Benedick, each of them taking pride in their verbal dexterity and each locked behind their redoubts in a perpetual war of the sexes. These impediments are overcome in the final joyous moment of the ending, but in the case of the Hero-Claudio match there is perhaps some discomfort in the modern viewer in the deviousness of the counter-machination needed to defeat Don John's scheme and in Claudio's capacity for volte face turnarounds.
The acting in this version is delightful. Luke Hunter as Claudio conveys well Claudio's dewy impressionability and the way it shades into gullibility. Jody Larcombe's is a poised, calm performance that reminds one a little of Kate Beckinsale's Hero in the Branagh version. The actors playing the second couple, Beatrice and Benedick, bring a new, sharply contemporary dimension to the characters: they are a Beatrice and Benedick for Generation X (Anna Elizabeth says that the sisters wanted to adapt Shakespeare to the teen movie: an intention evident in the flashbacks to Beatrice and Benedick's crush while at secondary school). Emma Beth Jones as Beatrice is by turn feisty, pouty, smouldering, considerate: her expressive range is remarkable, as in the moment when she bobs up from the water in the swimming pool with a bewildered, drenched face as she overhears Hero and Ursula talk of Benedick's secret love for her. Her headstrong performance is offset by Johnny Lucas' more vulnerable Benedick. Although this Benedick appears to have the throwaway nonchalance of a young man used to lolling around tennis courts with his servant in attendance and although he indulges in such brash gestures as trying to tear off a beer cap with his teeth, he is nevertheless touched with a certain insecurity. He is far from the self-assurance and the crystal-clear tones of Alexis Denisof's Benedick in the Whedon film. Indeed Johnny Lucas' lines often seem part-mumbled, as though they come out of lingering post-teen shyness and a resulting unwillingness to emote or declaim (his intonation, for example, of his lines such as "but so I am apt to do myself wrong; I am not so reputed" sounds like that overheard in a university bar). This mixture of maturity and greenness make this Benedick a suitable match for the Beatrice who says "he that is more than a youth is not for me".
Many other excellent performances could be mentioned. To be quite arbitrary about this, there is, for example, Jack Boal as Don John, a baby-faced reptilian malcontent, dispensing chaos out of his toxic callowness; Nils Behling makes a convincingly louche Borachio, John's satrap (he is the jacuzzi lounger mentioned earlier); and Peter Saracen is a charmingly avuncular Leonato, who loves his daughter but who can suddenly, crazily, go off the rails in his judgement of her.
The Shakespeare sisters have a supple and inventive cinematic idiom that ranges from sensitive framing of close ups to vibrant group arrangements such as the party scene where a masked Don Pedro woos Hero on Claudio's behalf. They can compose shots with an impressive beauty, as in the scene of Hero's attempted suicide and its evident echo of Millais' Pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia. They show a fine wit in such moments as Antonio's contacting "Last Minute Friar.com" for Hero and Claudio's impromptu wedding. "He can sing! He can rap!" the web page says. He does both in the film: the hip friar and his whiteboard flow diagrams, which plot Claudio's return to Hero, illustrate the sisters' satirical departure from many of the staid habits in the performance of this play, such as ponderously virtuous versions of Friar Francis.
The sisters themselves make a Hitchcockian appearance amongst the final wedding guests. In that scene these guests dance away to the sound of "Rock Bottom" by Jack and the Weatherman. It is an appropriately upbeat ending for this effervescent adaptation. The philosopher Hegel thought that comedy was morally superior to tragedy because it offered hope; the intersubjectivity toward which comedy works, he argued, was a negation of the negations that characterize the partial self and its illusions. "The world must be peopled" as Benedick says. Although the play might be said by some observers to carry a weight of unresolved dark baggage, especially of the ever-present possibility of sexual deceit, in the end all this is put aside in recognition of the final human need for community. As such this film matches its contemporary moment in early 2022 and the audience's longing for post-pandemic relief.
Joseph Kuhn.
